Recent Linguistics M.A. Thesis Titles

Spring 2008

Suprasegmental Structure in Meridional French and its Provençal Substrate

Alexander Marx Chabot

Southern French, also called Meridional French or Français du midi, has been recently recognized as a language variety separate from Standard French which deserves to be studied on its own. Nevertheless, it can be helpful to discuss Meridional French by contrasting it with Standard French, most notably by drawing attention to phonological differences between the two language varieties. Meridional French differs from Standard French in its pattern of mid vowel alternation, the common penultimate stress in lexical items, a preponderance of schwa resulting in mostly open syllables, the presence of post vocalic nasal consonants, and the existence of true diphthongs. All of these elements can be explained, with a high degree of predictive power, by examining the situation of language contact in the South of France, which has existed for at least 300 years. According to this proposal, the suprasegmental structures present in Provençal, the foot and the syllable, were transfered intact into French at the time of this language’s introduction into Provence. Such an analysis, which compares three languages, and examines a situation of language contact, takes advantage of both synchronic and diachronic methods in order to explain a purely synchronic phenomenon. The analysis is both theoretically informed and cognizant of language’s social situation. The thesis explains the source of the major differences between the two varieties of French in a simple and straightforward manner, while also shedding light on strictly synchronic problems that have previously occupied linguists interested in Meridional French.

Plural Formation in Dholuo

Frances Sayako Earle

Dholuo, spoken by the Luo people of Southwestern Kenya and Northern Tanzania, is known to have a complicated pattern of plural formation that is in many ways unpredictable, and published sources differ on the description of this phenomenon. This paper reconsiders the problem through the analysis of new data, taking into account likely patterns of historical inheritance. Data were obtained from a native speaker of Kisumu, South Nyanza dialect, whose pronunciation of 340 lexical items items (170 nouns and corresponding plural forms taken from Odaga’s 2005 Dholuo-English dictionary) was digitally recorded in June 2007. Synchronically, plural formation can be considered an affixation of one of two plural morphemes (-ɛ or -ni), with the precise pattern subject to regional variation), according to syllable structure. But historical considerations suggest that these morphemes may derive from an earlier number marking system that was based on three conceptual number categories (singulative, singular, plural) rather than two (singular, plural). The findings suggest that Dholuo number marking is more conservative than any of its siblings.