Documentation of morphophonological interactions in phrasal domains: Grammatical tone, vowel harmony, and phonological agreement

Linguists estimate that over half the world's 7,000 languages are tonal, with many of these endangered and not being acquired by children due to urbanization and an emphasis on formal education. This project will answer some of the many questions remaining about tone by focusing on a language displaying a rich tonal inventory, and a typologically unexpected system of consonant patterns and vowel harmony.

These features interact in complex and poorly understood ways in phrases and sentences. This project will describe and analyze these phenomena in detail with a specific emphasis on word building (morphology) and sound patterns (phonology). The project will provide new insights into many questions remaining about tone and its scalar properties in this language, and on the behavior of complex tonal and vowel harmony systems in morphology and syntax.

The results will be disseminated via journal articles on the descriptive and theoretical findings, a reference grammar and archived, annotated language data. In addition to its documentary goals, this project will support underrepresented students in international fieldwork and language documentation training. It will enhance the global competitiveness of the STEM workforce by fostering collaborative international relationships as sites of student learning.

This project will investigate Guébie, an understudied endangered Kru (Niger-Congo) language spoken in southwestern Côte d'Ivoire, as part of a collaborative effort by by linguists at Georgetown University, linguists at Félix Houphouët-Boigny University in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, and the Guébie community. Kru languages in general are underdocumented, though extant work shows that languages within the Kru family show typologically rare linguistic properties.

These include: 1) complex tonal systems with four tone heights, where tone distinguishes both lexical and grammatical contrasts; 2) unexpected patterning of implosive consonants with liquid consonants like rather than stops; 3) large vowel inventories with multiple types of vowel harmony, often conditioned by morphosyntactic environment; and 4) phonologically determined noun class agreement within noun phrases. Investigating these four properties and others will increase the scientific knowledge that depends critically on these linguistic features that are not found in languages like English, Spanish or their Indo-European relatives.

These patterns include such typologically rare phenomena as scalar tone alternations as the sole markers of case and aspect distinctions. Due to the atypical nature of the phonological inventory and morphological properties of Guébie, a complete understanding of the morphophonological system of the language has much to contribute to our collective understanding of the possible linguistic features of a natural language, and the theoretical tools most appropriate for modeling morphophonological phenomena.

Prosodic and phonological features, like those exhibited by Guébie, are highly vulnerable as languages become more endangered, which is happening in the Guébie community. This project also fosters strong connections between Ivoirians and Americans at globally focused academic institutions, which serves the national interest by helping to strengthen democracy and governance in Africa.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.