Research Highlights

My primary research focuses on the phonological description, analysis and theory of African languages. My research is guided by the following questions. Why are some sound-based regularities imposed within particular syntactically defined constituents and not others? Are different types of phonological patterns (vowel harmony, nasalisation, tone mapping, reduplication) subject to comparable restrictions in this regard? Why are ‘size’ requirements imposed on some phonological patterns, for example, the requirement that there be exactly two syllables in some constituent or that a syllable must contain an onset?

My secondary research area is sound-meaning mapping in language and language-external sources. In this case, I am interested in how the morpho-phonological processes mentioned above may be symbolically associated with meaning, challenging the view that non-arbitrary sound-meaning mapping is not an aspect of core phonology. Considering that sound-meaning mapping is an optional aspect of music but an obligatory aspect of language, I also investigate prominent examples of sound-meaning mapping in language-based verbal arts and music, such as the talking-drum languages of West Africa. In talking-drum systems and other speech surrogates, musicians map linguistic meaning to music melodies by imitating linguistic features with musical instruments. Speech surrogates do not only serve as language external evidence for linguistic theory but afford us the opportunity to investigate language in other modes of communication. While previous studies on speech surrogates have tended to focus more on musical imitation of language, my research also examine the “opposite”, which involves verbal imitation or interpretation of music melodies.

Data source: Documentation of endangered and understudied languages

My research addresses the issues above by using original data from the documentation of endangered and understudied African languages. Why are endangered and understudied languages worth studying? Research on endangered and understudied language are expanding our knowledge of human cognition, which is based on sampling those languages currently spoken. If the number of languages spoken shrinks considerably, this will affect the validity of many of our observations about what human beings are capable of in a domain as central to us as language. The openly accessible corpora, which are created from the results of my field work on these languages, serve as resources to the linguistic community.