The Structure of Burkina Faso Kusaal
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SIL Burkina Faso The Structure of Burkina Faso Kusaal Draft Edition Urs Niggli 2104 SIL, B.P. 1784, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso Preface The dialect of Kusaal which forms the basis of the present study is that spoken in and around Youga in the southeast of Burkina Faso, very close to the boarder to Ghana. Roughly the same language dialect is also spoken across the border in Ghana at the western side of the “Nakambe” river which separates Eastern from Western Kusaal. While there are various works on aspects of the Kusaal language, of which most have been written in Ghana, I felt the need for a sketch of the main aspects of the phonology, morphology, syntax and discourse of the Burkina Faso Kusaal in order to better understand the overall structure of Kusaal and provide a tool for those who want to further develop this beautiful language. Our insight was helpful for the development of an orthography guide and of the edition of the first Burkina Kusaal primer that is being used since 2012 in literacy. We did a sketch on the phonology (chapter 2) followed by an outline of the Nominal morphology (chapter 3) as well as the Verbal morphology (chapter 4). For the syntax analysis (chapter 5) we employed a structure - function approach. We tried to understand and describe the predictable grammatical patterns for Kusaal and the predictable ways in which the order of words in a sentence can (or cannot) be influenced by what goes on in the relationship between speakers and hearers, as well as the world around. This approach views the language as a series of ranks that have been set up and are described in this analysis as follows: Sentence Rank, Clause Rank, Phrase Rank, Word Rank and finally discourse Rank. This work could not have been a reality without input from various people. So I am particularly indebted to my Kusaal friends and colleagues Pastor Elie WANGRE, Pastor Emmanuel SOUGA, and Jacques Kobéna WARE. We used sources of Burkina Kusaal texts that we collected mostly in 2012 consisting of 30 texts of different kinds (of which 18 are narratifs) and of over 200 proverbs. 1 Summary List of Figures and list of Tables………………………………………………………….……..….…. 3 List of abbreviations..................………………………………………………………….……..….…. 4 1 Introduction ............................................................................................... 6 1.1 The people and the language ......................................................................................... 6 1.2 Sketch of morphology and syntax ................................................................................ 15 1.3 Orthography ................................................................................................................ 16 1.4 Maps ............................................................................................................................ 18 2 Phonology sketch .................................................................................... 20 2.1 Consonants .................................................................................................................. 20 2.2 Vowels ......................................................................................................................... 31 2.3 Syllabic structure ......................................................................................................... 41 2.4 Phonological processes ................................................................................................ 58 2.5 The tonal system .......................................................................................................... 79 2.6 Stress ........................................................................................................................... 96 3 Nominal morphology ............................................................................. 98 3.1 The noun class system ................................................................................................. 98 3.2 Combinations of noun classes or the “mixed class nouns” ......................................... 115 3.3 Structure of borrowed nouns ..................................................................................... 116 3.4 Associative nominal stem .......................................................................................... 117 3.5 Reduplication ............................................................................................................. 117 3.6 Qualification .............................................................................................................. 118 3.7 Adjectives .................................................................................................................. 119 3.8 Tone patterns on nouns ............................................................................................. 122 4 Verbal morphology .............................................................................. 127 4.1 Aspect ........................................................................................................................ 127 4.2 The other verb inflectional suffixes ........................................................................... 130 4.3 Tense ......................................................................................................................... 134 4.4 Mood.......................................................................................................................... 135 4.5 Derivational verb suffixes .......................................................................................... 136 4.6 Verb structure ............................................................................................................ 140 4.7 Stative verbs .............................................................................................................. 143 5 Kusaal syntax ......................................................................................... 145 5.1 Sentence rank ............................................................................................................ 145 5.2 Clause rank ................................................................................................................ 157 5.3 Phrase rank ................................................................................................................ 175 5.4 Word rank .................................................................................................................. 198 2 5.5 Discourse rank ........................................................................................................... 217 Table of contents…………...........……………………………………………............……..….…. 242 List of Figures Figure 1 : Language Family Tree for Kusaal 9 Figure 2 : Alphabet of Burkina Kusaal 16 Figure 3 : National Alphabet of Burkina Faso 16 Figure 4 : Location of Kusaal within Burkina Faso 18 Figure 5 : Kusaal is spoken in Ghana and in Burkina Faso 18 Figure 6 : Kusaal villages in Burkina Faso 18 Figure 7 : Linguistically related languages of Kusaal 19 Liste of Tables Table 1 : Phonetical consonant inventory 20 Table 2 : Phoneme chart of Kusaal consonants 21 Table 3 : Chart of the phonetical vowel inventory 31 Table 4 : The phonetic vowel chart 39 Table 5 : Consonant position within a word 54 Table 6 : Noun class suffixes for nouns and adjactives 55 Table 7 : The emphatic pronouns 206 Table 8 : The non-emphatic pronouns 206 Table 9 : List of 30 Kusaal texts 241 3 Abbreviations Abbreviations used for interlinear translation and glosses Example: Translation: AUX auxiliary le « again » COMPL completive ẽŋɩ-ya « did it » COND conditional ya’a « if » CONJ conjunction ka « and » DEF definite article la « the » DEM demonstrative -kãŋa « that » EMPH emphatic suffix or particle na’abo « a chief » FOC focus marker -ne « assertive » FUT future tense ne « will » IMP imperative Nuum ! « Drink! » IRR irrealis particle õ da’ane « he would have bought » IMPF imperfective aspect nuut « drinking » INTERJ interjection awoo « ok » IO indirect object ʋ « him » LOC locative marker -ɩ « in/at » NEG negation marker bʋ « not non-future » NEG.IMP negative imperative da « don’t » NEG.FUT negative future kʋn « won’t » NP noun phrase na’ap wef « chief’s horse » O object sɔta « the way » PAST distant past tense da « distant past » pl. plural biis « children » POSTPOS postposition zuk « on » PROH prohibitive da « don’t, should not » pron. pronoun ba « they » PRF perfective aspect Õ kɔ∅ ki « He farmed millet. » Q final question vowel boo ? « where? » SF syntagmatic feature ka « connective » SUB subordination marker ne « when » TD Time depth marker da « past » 4 Other abbreviations: + morpheme boundary dɩ+t σ Syllable CV µ Mora á [ ] Phonetic pronunciation ATR Advanced tongue root C / V / N Consonant / vowel / nasal in chapter on syllable structure Cl. Class (noun class) F Foot L / M / H / H Low / Mid / High / down stepped high tone in section on tonology NP Noun phrase TBU Tone bearing unit TC Tonal class of nominal roots VP Verbal phrase cf. compare e.g. for example etc. et cetera, and so on i.e. that is, in other words lit. literally sb. somebody sp. species (of) sth. something t.z. thick millet-porridge (Hausa: ‘tuan zaafi’) 5 1 Introduction 1.1 The people and the language 1.1.1 The Kusaasi people A) Language Location The Burkina Faso Kusaal region is located in the country's south-eastern corner, in the province of Boulgou. However, the great majority of the Kusaasi (the name given to the speakers of the language)