A phonological study of the four Gwari lects (Nigeria): Northern and Southern Gbagyi, and Northern and Southern Gbari. By making an analysis of each dialect, the author seeks greater understanding of the phonology of Gwari as a whole. Since palatalization, labialization, and nasalization are characteristic of Gwari, particular attention is given to these processes. Traditional segmental phonology is the theoretical framework of this study.

This volume contains a selection of papers that were presented at the 53rd Annual Conference on African Linguistics, which was held virtually at the University of California San Diego. There are 21 papers covering phonology, morphology, syntax, lexical semantics, sociolinguistics, typology and historical linguistics. The volume features a keynote paper that proposes a novel community-based approach to language documentation. African languages investigated in detail include Wolof, Mende, Dangme, Kusaal, Nzema, Anii, Nigerian Pidgin, Tunen, Nyokon, Vale, Lokoya, Lopit, Otuho, Kalenjin, Tiriki, Oromo, Tigrinya, Asá, Qwadza, and Ikalanga.

The Handbook of African Linguistics provides a holistic coverage of the key themes, subfields, approaches and practical application to the vast areas subsumable under African linguistics that will serve researchers working across the wide continuum in the field. Established and emerging scholars of African languages who are active and current in their fields are brought together, each making use of data from a linguistic group in Africa to explicate a chosen theme within their area of expertise, and illustrate the practice of the discipline in the continent.

First published in 1998. Part of the Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics series, this work looks at the analysis of elision directionaility and the correlation between the active value of (ATR) in a language and the language's vowel inventory. The paper develops the idea of ATR Predictability.

Sonority has a long and contentious history. It has often been invoked by linguists as an explanatory principle underlying various cross-linguistic phonotactic generalizations, especially within the domain of the syllable. However, many phonologists and phoneticians have expressed concerns about the adequacy of formal accounts based on sonority, including even doubts about the very existence of sonority itself. To date, the topic of sonority has never been the focus of an entire book. Consequently, this is the first complete volume that explores diverging viewpoints about phonological phenomena rooted in sonority taken from numerous languages. All of the contributors are well-known and respected linguists who publish their research in leading academic outlets. Furthermore, each chapter in this collection contains new, cutting-edge results based on the latest trends in the field. Hence, no other extant piece of literature matches this volume in terms of its breadth and coverage of issues, all converging on the common theme of sonority. Given the wide variety of subtopics in this collection, there is something to appeal to everyone — the list of contributions encompasses areas such as Optimality Theory, acquisition, computational modeling, acoustic phonetics, typology, syllable structure, speech perception, markedness, connectionism, psycholinguistics, and even MRI technology. What ties all of these issues together is a solid and consistent emphasis on sonority as a unified background phenomenon. Furthermore, a continuum of opinions about sonority is represented, ranging from complete acceptance and enthusiasm, on the one hand, to moderate skepticism on the other hand.

This study combines a descriptive and theoretical presentation of Kɔnni, a Gur language of northern Ghana. It presents an Optimality Theory analysis of the entire phonological system. The descriptions are separated from the formal analyses in order to facilitate use by both descriptivists and theoreticians.Morphology is described, including the noun class system, reduplicative agentive nouns, noun-adjective complexes, nominal derivations, and various verbal aspectual suffixes. Major sections are included on consonants, vowels, and tone. The volume also includes a brief syntax sketch, co occurrence restrictions, phoneme frequency counts, measurements of segment durations and vowel formants, and seven appendices of data. Selected notes of interest:? Some phonology is limited to only certain noun classes.' The 9-vowel ATR vowel system and diphthongization are integrally related.' Certain vowels assimilate only across consonants having the same place feature. ? Tonal perturbations require four different underlying representations for different nouns which have a surface [LH] tone.' True tonal polarity is distinct from dissimilation.' Two cases of syntax-phonology interface are demonstrated.Michael Cahill (Ph.D., linguistics, The Ohio State University, 1999) has been with SIL since 1982, and worked on site with Kɔnni speakers from 1986 to 1993. He was a member of the LSA's Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation from 2001-2003, chairing it in 2003. He is an adjunct faculty member of the University of Texas at Arlington and of the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics and is currently based in Dallas as the International Linguistics Coordinator of SIL.