How Finnish (and Universals in Phonology) helped me to understand Senufo

• Main Authors: Souleymane, Dembele, Léonard, Jean Léo
• Other Authors: University of Bamako Mali, Laboratoire de sociolinguistique, d’anthropologie des pratiques langagières et de didactique des langues-cultures (DIPRALANG), Université Paul-Valéry - Montpellier 3 (UPVM), University of Helsinki
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2021
• Subjects: typological phonology; contrastive phonology; consonant correlations; vowel harmony; approximants; Finnic; Senufo; morphophonology; [SHS]Humanities and Social Sciences; votic
• Online Access: https://univ-montpellier3-paul-valery.hal.science/hal-04055291

International audience Mamara (or Minyanka) is a Senufo language (Gur, Niger-Congo) spoken in South-eastern Mali, Burkina-Faso (South) and Ivory Coast (North-West) by 738 000 speakers. Unlike Bantu languages, it is more a fusional (or inferential) than an agglutinative (incremential) language, as far as morphology is concerned. Like many Finnic languages, it has no voiced/unvoiced correlation for obstruents, although voiced stops and fricatives may surface according to distributional rules (e.g. in lenis contexts, as V_V). Similarly, unvoiced stops (p, t, c, k) contrast with a set of articulatory corresponding approximants. Although Finnic and Gur have Vowel Harmony (VH), as many of other languages in their linguistic stock or phylum, this constraint goes according to palatal/velar features for the former, and Advanced Tongue Root vowel aperture for the latter. As expected according to universal trends, HV attrition, as in Northern Estonian, or complexification, as in in Votic, can be observed in both systems, with similar mechanisms (once again, out of universal constraints). Nevertheless, vowel underspecification plays an important role in Gur, as in Finnish. All these commun properties, out of the implicative clustering of typological patterns within the framework of Universal Grammar (here, Universal Phonology), make every single one of these languages observed here heuristic to one another, although they do not share, of course, any inherited features. Two typological « feature blocks » can be spotted here, in this respect: 1)The Unvoiced Stops & Approximant Contextual consonant gradation.2)Variable patterns in VH (palatal/velar vs. ATR) & Underspecified VIn this case, extended knowledge of the (morpho)phonology of Finnic languages – which benefit a deep and rich scholarly tradition, since the 19th Century) helped us much to understand the intrication of phonological patterns of underdocumented languages, as Senufo varieties.Main differences between the two systems lay in spectific parameters of ...