Phonological reflexes of emphasis in Kwa languages of Côte D’Ivoire

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31513/linguistica.2021.v17n1a54533

Keywords:

segmental and tonal processes, negation and final particles, ideophones, nominalization of the verb and types of emphasis marking, register raising, downdrift and upsweep.

Abstract

This paper examines the phonological characteristics of expressions conveying emphasis, insistence, and contrast in some Kwa languages of Côte d’Ivoire. Our particular interest is to reveal how such phenomena are realized in tonal languages, and we thought it worthwhile to study more than one language yet to confine the study to a closely related group. In this group a variety of phonological strategies are used to mark emphasis, including prosodic devices that have not been widely reported in the literature for Niger-Congo languages, and that may or may not differ from other language groups. Thus, our goal was to capture the various phonological means for expressing emphasis in the Kwa languages of Côte d`Ivoire. For that purpose, we surveyed emphasis marking in several Kwa languages, collecting both phonological reflexes of emphasis that go beyond the emphatic particles and raised intonations that are most frequently cited.

Author Biographies

William R. Leben, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University. Stanford, USA

Professor William Leben got his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Linguistics) (1973). He was Professor of Linguistics, Stanford University (1986-2003), Chair at the Department of Linguistics, Stanford University (1988-1992),  and Associate Professor of Linguistics, Stanford University (1978-86). He is Professor of Linguistics Emeritus, Stanford University, 2003 to present. He worked for a total of five years in West Africa, including two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Niger, two years in research and teaching in Nigeria, and a year of research and teaching in Cote d'Ivoire. His main research interests are in linguistic tone and intonation, the structure of English vocabulary, African linguistics, and the use of language in advertising and in brand names. He have done fieldwork in Niger, Nigeria, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire on tone and intonation in Chadic and Kwa languages, and have collaborated on books and digital materials for teaching Hausa. His most recent book, co-authored with Brett Kessler, is a totally revised edition of Anatole Lyovin’s Introduction to the Languages of the World for Oxford University Press. Currently he is working on a new book for Oxford University Press, Advertising and the Language of Persuasion, based on Stanford courses from spring quarter, 2016-17 and 2018-19.  During his academic life he received the following awards: Officier de l’Ordre du Mérite Ivoirien, awarded by the government of Côte d’Ivoire for  contributions to the study of its languages (2014);  plaques recognizing contributions to African linguistics, Ohio University (2000), and University of Florida at Gainesville (1996);  Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, Stanford University (1976-77).

Firmin Ahoua, Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Ivory Coast

Dr. Firmin Ahoua is a member of the Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Unité des langues, littératures et civilisations  (LLC), Ivory Coast. Dr Ahoua was educated at the Department of German of that university (then Université Nationale de Côte d'Ivoire) and the Universities of Saarbrücken (M.A.) and Bielefeld (Ph.D.) as DAAD scholar. Subsequently he held a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of California at Berkeley, and was Humboldt Scholar jointly at the Universities of Bielefeld and Stuttgart. He was co-director of the NSF funded project Comparative Phonology of Ivoirian Languages, concentrating on the Kwa/Tano group, in which extensive audio recordings of different primary data types, transcriptions and comparative phonological analyses were made, and doctoral dissertations supervised. Dr Ahoua has been Visiting Professor at the University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, has held numerous positions in West African academic review and selection committees, and is an active member of the West African Linguistic Society. He has published numerous papers on various aspects of the phonology and discourse prosody of Kwa languages, and was local co-director of the Bielefeld-Abidjan Encyclopédie project. Dr Ahoua is a native speaker of two Kwa languages, his maternal language Baule and his paternal language Attié, and French, and speaks near-native German and English.

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Published

2021-04-12

Issue

Vol. 17 No. 1 (2021): Linguistics, indigenous languages, and analysis from a formal perspective

Section

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