Fieldwork and Language Documentation

Countability distinctions and semantic variation

Amy Rose Deal
2017

To what extent are countability distinctions subject to systematic semantic variation? Could there be a language with no countability distinctions—in particular, one where all nouns are count? I argue that the answer is no: even in a language where all NPs have the core morphosyntactic properties of English count NPs, such as combining with numerals directly and showing singular/plural contrasts, countability distinctions still emerge on close inspection. I divide these distinctions into those related to sums (cumulativity) and those related to parts (divisiveness, atomicity, and...

Classification of Guébie within Kru

Hannah Sande
2018

Guébie, a Kru language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire, is currently doubly classified within Eastern Kru according to Ethnologue (Lewis et al. 2013). It is listed as a dialect of two distinct subgroups, Bété and Dida. This double classification is clearly problematic, and this paper provides the initial work towards addressing the correct classification of the language. Here I compare the phonological and syntactic properties of Guébie with surrounding Bété and Dida languages in order to determine its relatedness to each subgroup. I conclude that Guébie is more closely related to Vata, a Dida...

Cross-word morphologically conditioned scalar tone shift in Guébie

Hannah Sande
2018

This paper presents data bearing on two key issues in morphophonological theory: 1) the domain of phonological evaluation, and 2) the item- versus process-morphology debate. I present data from Guébie (Kru) [Côte d’Ivoire] showing that imperfective aspect is exponed by a scalar shift in surface tone, which can affect either the tone of the inflected verb, or the subject noun phrase. There are four tone heights in Guébie, and the first syllable of a verb can underlyingly be associated with any of the four tones. In imperfective contexts only, that initial verb tone lowers one step on...

The division of labor between representations and cophonologies in doubly conditioned processes in Amuzgo

Yuni Kim
Hannah Sande
2020

This paper introduces a doubly conditioned phonological alternation in Amuzgo (OtoManguean) [Southern Mexico], where both a morphologically specific condition and a lexically specific condition must be met for a phonological alternation to surface. We interpret previous frameworks as making distinct specific predictions about the locality restrictions of the two conditioning factors in doubly morphologically conditioned phonology. We test these predictions against the Amuzgo case study.

Guébie (Côte d’Ivoire, Ivory Coast) - Language Snapshot

Hannah Sande
2020

Guébie (also known as Gaɓogbo) is a Kru language spoken by about 7,000 people in the Gagnoa prefecture in southwest Côte d’Ivoire. Guébie people are primarily subsistence farmers, growing cassava, rice, corn, and plantains. Many also grow cocoa and rubber for profit. In the past 20 years there has been an influx of outsiders settling in Guébie villages, new roads have been developed which lead to easier access to nearby cities, and new schools have been built where French is taught and use of Guébie is not allowed. For these reasons, among others, French and Bété, the local language of...

Nouchi as a distinct language: The morphological evidence

Hannah Sande
2015

In this paper I argue that Nouchi, a relatively young Ivoirian contact variety, is and should be treated as a full-fledged language distinct from French and its other source languages. Nouchi, an emerging language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire since that late 1970’s (Ayewa 2005), has been treated in the literature as a slang vocabulary or an urban youth dialect of French. Though Nouchi began as a lingua franca among uneducated youth in urban centers, it is now the preferred language of Ivoirians in Abidjan and the surrounding areas of Côte d’Ivoire (Kube-Barth 2009). This paper focuses on...

Theory and description in African linguistics

Emily Clem
Peter Jenks
Hannah Sande
2019

This collection contains 36 papers presented at the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at UC Berkeley from March 23-March 26, 2016.1 This meeting of ACAL coincided with a special workshop entitled “Areal features and linguistic reconstruction in Africa”, and we are glad to include four papers from that workshop in this collection as well. Collectively, these papers add a sizable body of scholarship to the study of African languages, including valuable new descriptions of African languages, novel theoretical analyses of them, and important insights into our...

Possessor raising

Amy Rose Deal
2013

Various languages allow instances of external possession—possessive encoding without a possessive structure in DP. The analysis of these cases has long been a battleground of raising versus control. I provide a new argument from Nez Perce in support of possessor raising of a type thematically parallel to raising to subject. The possessor phrase moves from a possessum-DP-internal position to an athematic A-position within vP. Like raising to subject, this movement is obligatory and does not result in the assignment of a new θ-role to the moving element. A case-driven treatment of...

Person-based split ergativity in Nez Perce is syntactic

Amy Rose Deal
2016

Nez Perce is one among many ergative languages that consistently use nominative case, rather than ergative, for 1st and 2nd person transitive subjects. Two major lines of analysis have been proposed for the synchronic grammar of this type of ergative split. Morphological analyses approach the phenomenon as a case of syncretism between ergative and nominative in 1st and 2nd person; all transitive subjects are assigned an identical syntax. Syntactic analyses posit a featural or structural distinction between 3rd person subjects and 1st and 2nd person subjects, or the clauses containing...

Plural exponence in the Nez Perce DP: a DM analysis

Amy Rose Deal
2016

This paper analyzes two patterns of number marking in the DP in Nez Perce (Sahaptian) within the framework of Distributed Morphology. The first involves under-realization of plural on nouns. Number has classically been understood as a feature inherent to nouns, rather than to adjectives that modify them. In Nez Perce, however, only a small set of nouns show number morphology, whereas number morphology is highly productive on adjectival modifiers. Adjectives in fact may realize the plural more than once per word—an instance of multiple exponence. I show that the puzzle of under-...