THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO THE PHONOLOGY AND MORPHOLOGY OF MONO VOLUME ONE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS BY KENNETH S. OLSON CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MARCH 2001 Copyright © 2001 by Kenneth S. Olson All rights reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME ONE LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................................................v LIST OF TABLES ...........................................................................................................vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................viii ABSTRACT........................................................................................................................xi ABBREVIATIONS ...........................................................................................................xii Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................1 1.1 Demography and geography ...............................................................2 1.2 Classification.......................................................................................5 1.3 Ethnology and history .......................................................................11 1.4 The sociolinguistic situation .............................................................15 1.5 Dialects..............................................................................................18 1.6 Previous research on Mono ...............................................................19 1.7 Overview and methodology ..............................................................20 2. PHONEMES ....................................................................................................24 2.1 Consonants ........................................................................................27 2.2 Vowels ..............................................................................................38 2.3 Distribution of phonemes ..................................................................42 3. TONE ...............................................................................................................46 3.1 Lexical tone .......................................................................................46 3.2 Grammatical tone ..............................................................................50 3.3 Distribution of tones .........................................................................52 4. LABIALIZATION AND PALATALIZATION..............................................56 4.1 Description ........................................................................................58 4.2 Suggested interpretations ..................................................................62 4.3 Distribution of labialization and palatalization .................................67 5. THE SYLLABLE ............................................................................................69 5.1 Syllable types ....................................................................................71 6. WORD SHAPES .............................................................................................77 6.1 Nominal word shapes ........................................................................78 6.2 Verbal word shapes ...........................................................................86 6.3 Adverbial word shapes ......................................................................87 6.4 Grammatical-function-word word shapes .........................................90 7. MORPHOLOGY ............................................................................................91 7.1 Grammatical categories.....................................................................92 7.2 Phonological processes which cross morpheme or word boundaries .......................................................................................118 7.3 Summary .........................................................................................122 iii iv 8. ACOUSTIC PHONETICS.............................................................................124 8.1 Consonants ......................................................................................126 8.2 Vowels ............................................................................................151 8.3 Secondary articulations ...................................................................167 8.4 Summary and further research ........................................................171 9. CONCLUSION ..............................................................................................173 VOLUME TWO Appendices A. TEXTS ...........................................................................................................175 A.1 The elephant, the turtle, and the hippo (narrative text) ...................175 A.2 Preparing the fields for planting (procedural text) ..........................186 A.3 Proverbs ..........................................................................................189 A.4 Frequency counts ............................................................................192 B. WORD LIST ..................................................................................................194 C. AN EVALUATION OF NIGER-CONGO CLASSIFICATION ..................241 C.1 Niger-Congo classification: major sub-groupings ..........................244 C.2 Kwa and Benue-Congo ...................................................................246 C.3 Bantu ...............................................................................................250 C.4 Adamawa-Ubangi ...........................................................................256 C.5 Discussion .......................................................................................264 C.6 Conclusion ......................................................................................272 D. CROSS-LINGUISTIC INSIGHTS ON THE LABIAL FLAP ......................274 D.1 Introduction .....................................................................................274 D.2 Geographic distribution...................................................................275 D.3 Genetic distribution .........................................................................277 D.4 Articulation .....................................................................................280 D.5 Phonological status .........................................................................283 D.6 The origin of the labial flap.............................................................292 D.7 Languages containing the labial flap ..............................................294 D.8 Conclusion ......................................................................................312 E. RECORDINGS ..............................................................................................313 F. ADDITIONAL TABLES...............................................................................322 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................355 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1: The languages of northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo ....................3 Figure 1.2: The locations of the Mono people and their ancestors .................................13 Figure 2.1: Consonant phonemes in Mono......................................................................27 Figure 2.2: Articulation of a portion of the word a$w(e@to$ro$ ‘stick used in an animal trap’ (Speaker A, cf. Chapter 8). Frames are 30 ms apart .....................................31 Figure 2.3: Vowel phonemes in Mono ............................................................................38 Figure 2.4: Reanalyzed Mono vowel system ..................................................................40 Figure 8.1: Waveform and spectrogram of the possible word aw(a (Speaker K). The period of closure is indicated by the arrows ...............................................127 Figure 8.2: Waveform and spectrogram of the word a@w(a@ra@ ‘fierceness’ (Speaker K) 128 Figure 8.3: Waveform and spectrogram of the word ja#w(e$le$ ‘catfish’ (Speaker K) .....128 Figure 8.4: Waveform and spectrogram of the word a#wa# ‘road’ (Speaker K) .............130 Figure 8.5: Waveform and spectrogram of the word w(®Ûl®Û ‘calf, shin’. Voicing precedes a word-initial labial flap (Speaker A) ............................................................130 Figure 8.6: Waveform and spectrogram of the word k«@Öw(a$ ‘to send’ (Speaker A) .....131 Figure 8.7: Waveform of the possible word aba (Speaker K) ......................................133 Figure 8.8: Waveform of the possible word aºa (Speaker K) ......................................134 Figure 8.9: Waveform of the possible word ada (Speaker K) ......................................134 Figure 8.10: Waveform of the possible word aëa (Speaker K) ......................................135 Figure 8.11: Waveform and spectrogram of possible word aba (Speaker K). Beginning and end of closure are indicated by the arrows (see Section 8.1.4) ............135 Figure 8.12: Waveform and spectrogram of possible word aºa (Speaker K) ................136 Figure 8.13: Waveform of the word ºa@Öa$t®Û ‘low’ (Speaker K) ......................................136 Figure 8.14: