Aspects of Pulaar Non-Linear Phonology

231 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998.The language under study in this thesis is Pulaar, a dialect of Fula. Fula belongs to the West Atlantic language group of the Niger-Congo family (cf. Greenberg 1960). It is spoken by an estimated fifteen to seventeen million people from the Atlantic to the Sudan and into parts of Ethiopia (cf. Crystal 1987 for figures, and Paradis 1986, 1993; Labouret 1952, Arnott 1970, etc... for description/analysis of various dialects). Fula is referred to as (Haal) Pulaar (Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Gambia), Fulfulde (Niger, Nigeria, Sudan), Toucouleur/Tukulor (Senegal), Fulacunda, Peulh, etc. The dialect studied in this thesis is spoken in (southern) Mauritania, more specifically in the Kayhaydi area. The purpose of the thesis is to study aspects of Pulaar Phonology from a non-linear perspective. The thesis is divided into six chapters organized as follows: we begin with an introductory chapter in which we present certain crucial facts and general notions about Pulaar. We give the vowel as well as consonant inventory of the language and a general review of the morphology and syntax of Pulaar. Because many processes discussed in this dissertation make reference, in one way or another to the syllable, chapter two is going to discuss the Pulaar syllable, using the moraic framework. In this chapter we present arguments in favor of syllable-internal structure in moraic phonology. Chapter three describes and analyzes vowel deletion and vowel spreading with a view to determining the domain of the rule. It will be demonstrated that vowel deletion is sensitive to syntactic information and that current approaches within the syntax-phonology interface cannot adequately handle the Pulaar data. In this chapter we also deal with issues related to the interaction between vowel deletion and the Pulaar syllable. Chapter four is about vowel harmony in Pulaar and its domain. In this chapter we also discuss the interaction between vowel harmony and vowel deletion. Following this, chapter five is going to deal with vowel length alternations in Pulaar. It will be shown that previous solutions for the phenomenon (Paradis 1986, 1993; Prunet and Tellier 1984) could be improved in order to account for data that either seemed problematic for or not dealt with by the previous authors. In addition, we will also discuss the interaction between vowel length alternations, vowel deletion, and the facts of Pulaar syllable. Chapter six summarizes the dissertation.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD