Cushitic (Somali & Maay: Somalia, Kenya, diaspora)
Recent work on Somali (iso: som) is found in two papers, one on moraic mismatches and the other on complex exponence of the Somali subject marker.
I am currently collaborating with Nicola Lampitelli (Tours) on matters related to an apparent partial collapse of the vowel harmony system in Djibouti Somali.
Other work in Cushitic is on Maay (iso: ymm), in collaboration with Katrina Smith (Syracuse MA '22, and current U-Florida PhD student). Our work focuses on tone in the Maay nominal system, and more broadly, the origin of its prosodic system and prosodic variation reported across Maay varieties.
Jarawan - Nigeria
Building on work begun with former MA student, Milkatu Garba† , aimed at documenting her mother tongue Mbat [iso: bau], I have continued work on the description and documentation of three languages of the Jarawan "Jar" cluster: Mbat, Galamkya, and Duguri. The Jarawan languages are scattered throughout Nigeria and formerly Cameroon. For all intents and purposes, these languages are undescribed.
Funding from the Endangered Language Fund supported the purchase of equipment, consultant payment, and Garba's travel to Bauchi State, Nigeria in order to expand data and narrative collection December 2019/January 2020. During this trip, Milkatu collected 50 narratives and elicited targeted questionnaire data from speakers of different generation. Data collection has since expanded to Duguri and Galamkya. Two journal articles have resulted from this research thus far, with other in progress
I am currently working with Rebecca Grollemund (U-Missouri) on matters related to the relationship of Jarawan to Southern Bantoid vs. Narrow Bantu, as well as on reconstruction of Proto-Jarawan based on a database of 17 Jarawan varieties that we have cultivated.
Wanga (Luyia - Western Kenya)
This is a large, ongoing project titled Collaborative Research Grant: Structure and tone in Luyia that was funded beginning in 2014 by the US National Science Foundation; some portions of the project continue to be funded by the NSF. The project aims to analyze the phonology-syntax interface in four Luyia languages. My effort on the project has been focused on Wanga [iso:lwg]. Ongoing work includes:
The tonology of Wanga nouns and verbs - A monograph that covers the complex tonal patterns and tone rule interactions in Wanga nouns and verbs. A proposal for this book has been accepted at Language Science Press
Wanga grammar - A second book-length project focused more broadly on aspects of Wanga grammar
Wanga lexicon - Currently ~4,500 headwords, planned as an open-source digital 'talking' dictionary
Collaborators on this project include Michael Marlo (Missouri), Michael Diercks (Pomona), and David Odden (Ohio State, emeritus)
Mande
In 2018, I completed an extensive survey of Western Mande languages that explored patterns of word-level replacive tone. There are subtle micro-patterns pertaining to replacive tone that are manifested in particular languages. Working jointly with Maria Konoshenko, this work has been expanded upon to include all branches of Mande, with an article based on this work appearing in Mandenkan in 2022.
More broadly, I am interested in the metrical structure of Mande languages, particularly at the level of the foot. I have explored these matters in Bambara and Susu and have more recently begun to expand the scope of my inquiry to other languages in hopes of finding commonalities between their behaviors.
Dogon
I occasionally work on matters related to Dogon languages based on data collected by the Dogon and Bangime Languages project (Jeffrey Heath, U-Michigan). On these languages, I have worked with Abbie Hantgan (LLACAN-CNRS) to analyze aspects of Bondu So phonology.