The Prosodic System of Southern Bobo Madare

Abstract

This dissertation describes the word-level and phrase-level prosodic system of Southern Bobo Madare (Bobo), a Mande language of Burkina Faso. I examine tonal aspects of Bobo’s prosodic system and provide an extensive phonetic description of the use of non-modal phonation and final lengthening to mark utterance type. The data examined include both elicitation tasks and spontaneous speech tasks. The work is conducted within the framework of autosegmental-metrical theory (Pierrehumbert 1980).

Several aspects of the word-level prosodic system are discussed. Previous work on Bobo (Morse, 1976; Le Bris & Prost, 1981; Sanou, 1993) disagree on the inventory of contour tones and the existence of word stress. I present an analysis in support of three contour tones: High-Low, Low-High, and Low-Mid. I do not find clear phonetic evidence of word stress. Phonological analysis supports the existence of stress however: The distribution of reduced vowels supports the existence of iambic prosodic feet, which is common in Mande languages. Furthermore, the distribution of tone melodies is best explained by assuming that tone melodies are assigned to the foot rather than to the word or morpheme, similar to Leben’s (2001) proposal for tonal feet in Bamana.

While both word-level and phrase-level prosody are discussed, most attention is given to phrase-level prosodic phenomena. In recent years, there has been increased interest in the phrase-level prosody of African tone languages (Downing & Rialland, 2016). However, detailed descriptions of the phrase-level prosody of Mande languages still remain extremely rare. This is the first such description of a Mande language with three tone levels. Bobo makes relatively little use of intonational tones. Declarative statements are marked only through final lengthening and in some cases non-modal vowel phonation. Polar questions show some characteristics of the areal “lax question prosody” described by Rialland (2009): L% boundary tone, which is concatenated onto the string of lexical tones, extreme lengthening of the phrase-final segment (always a vowel in Bobo), and breathy utterance termination. This L% boundary tone is the only clear case of an intonational tone in Bobo. Wh-questions can (but typically do not) have an L% boundary tone and have a lesser degree of phrase-final lengthening than polar questions. Negated statements do not have special prosodic characteristics. The phrase-level prosodic hierarchy of Bobo is relatively flat, consisting of only the intonational phrase. In addition to investigating the prosodic marking of utterance type, I present an investigation into focus marking in Bobo. I examine the responses to wh-questions and corrections, two contexts in which focus-marking is typically found cross-linguistically. I find no evidence of morphosyntactic or prosodic focus marking in these contexts. Bobo is therefore an additional example of an African tone language without obligatory focus marking in these contexts.

The relevance of these results to our current understanding of prosodic typology is discussed throughout.