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Through original and highly detailed fieldwork on five under-studied languages of West Africa, Jason Kandybowicz develops a novel theory of the interaction between the distribution of interrogative expressions and the sound system of a language. The book also considers data from thirteen additional typologically diverse languages to demonstrate the theory's reach and extendibility.
List of contents
- List of Abbreviations Used in Non-Cited Data
- Acknowledgments
- Map of Languages Covered in This Book
- Chapter 1: Introduction
- Chapter 2: Prosodic Entanglement and the Anti-Contiguity of Wh and C.
- Chapter 3: An Anti-Contiguity Approach to Tano In-Situ Interrogative Distribution
- Chapter 4: An Anti-Contiguity Approach to Nupe Interrogative Distribution
- Chapter 5: Anti-Contiguity Cross-Linguistically
- References.
About the author
Jason Kandybowicz is Associate Professor of Linguistics at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He specializes in the syntax of West African languages and has published extensively on a variety of topics in formal syntax, field linguistics, and the syntax-phonology interface. He is the author of The Grammar of Repetition: Nupe Grammar at the Syntax-Phonology Interface (2008) and co-editor of Africa's Endangered Languages: Documentary and Theoretical Approaches (OUP 2017).
Summary
Through original and highly detailed fieldwork on five under-studied languages of West Africa, Jason Kandybowicz develops a novel theory of the interaction between the distribution of interrogative expressions and the sound system of a language. The book also considers data from thirteen additional typologically diverse languages to demonstrate the theory's reach and extendibility.
Additional text
This book is a very welcome contribution to research on the syntax-phonology interface. Empirically, it explores in depth a wealth of prosodic and syntactic data from lesser-described West African languages, and theoretically, it raises a number of important and challenging questions which will help guide future research. The approach taken in this work investigates core issues at the syntax-prosody interface in a way that engages seriously with insights from diverse subfields, including phonetics, phonology, prosody, syntax, and the syntax-phonology interface.
