Laura McPherson – författare

This Element addresses the challenges and opportunities that arise in the study of sound systems of understudied languages within the context of language documentation, an expanding field that seeks to develop records of the world's languages and their patterns of use in their broader cultural and social context. The topics covered in this Element focus on different elements of language documentation and their relationship to phonological analysis, including lexicography, documentary corpora, music and the verbal arts, as well as grammar writing. For each of these areas, the authors examine methodological and theoretical implications for phonology. With growing concern in the field of language documentation and linguistics more generally for the distribution and implementation of the products of research and its impact for Indigenous language communities, this Element also discusses how phonological documentation may contribute to the development of resources for language communities.

This Element addresses the challenges and opportunities that arise in the study of sound systems of understudied languages within the context of language documentation, an expanding field that seeks to develop records of the world's languages and their patterns of use in their broader cultural and social context. The topics covered in this Element focus on different elements of language documentation and their relationship to phonological analysis, including lexicography, documentary corpora, music and the verbal arts, as well as grammar writing. For each of these areas, the authors examine methodological and theoretical implications for phonology. With growing concern in the field of language documentation and linguistics more generally for the distribution and implementation of the products of research and its impact for Indigenous language communities, this Element also discusses how phonological documentation may contribute to the development of resources for language communities.

Stimulating, engaging, and effective, the games and activites in this book offer your students alternatives to learning by rote or performing drills. This book makes it easy for you to develop their linguistic functions through active learning. The specific skills and vocabulary taught in each game or activity is highlighted, as are the easy-to-follow instructions, helpful charts, worksheets and other visuals.

Stimulating, engaging, and effective, the games and activites in this book offer your students alternatives to learning by rote or performing drills. This book makes it easy for you to develop their linguistic functions through active learning. The specific skills and vocabulary taught in each game or activity is highlighted, as are the easy-to-follow instructions, helpful charts, worksheets and other visuals.

Tommo So is a Dogon language with approximately 60,000 speakers in Mali, West Africa. As only the second full grammatical description of a Dogon language, this volume is a critical resource for solving the mystery of Dogon's genetic affiliation with other languages in Africa. Tommo So is an SOV language with isolating nominal morphology and agglutinative verbal morphology; suffixes on the verb mark tense/aspect/negation as well as subject agreement. The phonology is sensitive to levels of verbal morphology in that variable vowel harmony applies less frequently as one moves to outer layers of the morphology. The tone system of Tommo So is of typological interest in both its phonological and syntactic instantiations. Phonologically, it is a two-tone system of H and L, but these specified tones contrast with a surface-underspecified tone. Grammatically, the lexical tone of a word is often overwritten by syntactically-induced overlays. For example, an inalienable noun's tone will be replaced with L if it is possessed by a non-pronominal possessor, and by either H or HL if the possessor is pronominal. The language has also innovated a series of locative quasi-verbs and focus particles sensitive to pragmatic factors like certainty.

Seenku is a Western Mande language of the Samogo group spoken in southwestern Burkina Faso by approximately 17,000 speakers. It has undergone a lot of phonological reduction, leading to a rich segmental and tonal phoneme inventory but mainly mono- and sesquisyllabic roots. The language has four contrastive levels of tone that combine to create over a dozen contours. Tone has a high functional load lexically and grammatically, permeating all aspects of grammar. Most verbs have two stem forms: a realis form and an irrealis form. The realis is derived from the irrealis by infixing a high vowel before the stem vowel, creating a diphthong. The use of a particular stem form is determined by aspect and construction type, but most other morphosyntactic meanings (e.g. progressive aspect or causative) are expressed analytically. Like most Mande languages, Seenku has an S Aux O V X word order in addition to areal clause-final negation. It displays a reduced set of post-subject “predicate markers” compared to other Mande languages, and those that are attested are variably realized only by tone changes and lengthening on the subject itself.