Lagos' Bus Stop Names and their Pronunciations by Danfo Bus Conductors

Danfo Buses are one of the main means of transportation in Lagos. For commuters to move from one location to another, it is highly essential that they know their bus stops and how the Danfo bus conductors pronounce them. This is because an inability to understand how these bus stops are pronounced will make it difficult for commuters to locate their destination. This paper aims to classify Lagos bus stop names based on their languages and sources of origin and demystify their pronunciation by Danfo bus conductors. Data was gathered through audio recordings of the speeches of the Danfo bus conductors. Data shows that bus stops in Lagos were named using both the local and English languages. Data also reveals that the names of these bus stops were derived from several ancient landmarks, including religious landmarks, commercial activities, agro-related landmarks, ancient edifices, and long-standing handiwork practices around these bus stops either now or in time past. The data further shows that the Danfo bus conductors employ various phonological processes such as vowel deletion, nasal deletion, vowel lengthening, consonant deletion, and word deletion in the pronunciation of bus stop names. The public is urged to take cognisance of these pronunciations in order not to miss their locations.

Meter in Traditional Kakataibo Chants

This paper studies the principal aspects of meter of three traditional Kakataibo chants (a Panoan group of Peruvian Amazonia). Regarding meter, Kakataibo chants exhibit patterns relevant for the cross-linguistic study of line and meter typology. I describe the Kakataibo system of versification as a quantitative meter that counts an exact number of moras and regulates the distribution of these by imposing grouping restrictions; also, it establishes weight differences between light, heavy and superheavy syllables, and vowel lengthening plays an important role for meter purposes. In addition, the average duration of lines tends to last less than three seconds and decreases progressively during performance.

Nasality in Dagbani prosody

This paper presents a detailed analysis of nasality in Dagbani, a Gur language of Ghana, and the role it plays in Dagbani prosody. It demonstrates that the nasal is at the centre of defining the range of what is possible in Dagbani prosodic patterns. Nasals provide the basis for determining the full range of syllable types and the tone bearing unit of Dagbani; nasals are the only coda consonants that licence vowel lengthening; and nasals provide the only cases of phonological non-vocalic geminates. The overall effects of the influence of nasality is the emergence of complex prosodic structures. Contrary to the crosslinguistically acclaimed marked position of the coda, the CVN syllable is the default, unmarked syllable in Dagbani.

Moraic preservation and equivalence in Gújjolaay Eegimaa perfective reduplication

The role of syllable weight in Gújjolaay Eegimaa, an Atlantic language spoken in south-western Senegal, is evidenced by reduplicative patterns in the perfective stem, where we witness a difference in the surface representation of verb roots with underlying voiced obstruents from those with underlying voiceless obstruents. We argue that voiced plosives are weight bearing and therefore considered as moraic when in coda position in this language. We attribute the triggering of the gemination in the reduplicative perfective with roots having final voiced plosives to compensatory lengthening in order to make up for the loss of a mora as motivated by Hayes (1989). Gemination, rather than vowel lengthening, occurs because, as stated by de Chene and Anderson (1979) compensatory lengthening of vowels only occurs in a language where vowel length is contrastive. In this paper, we show evidence to support the proposition that there are no long vowels in this variety of Eegimaa, and therefore gemination (which is a contrastive feature in the language) is the repair strategy employed to compensate for the loss of a mora. Through a description of the weight-related processes observed in perfective reduplication in Eegimaa, we will detail the moraic analysis of the various patterns and discuss general phonological implications.

When the tune shapes morphology: The origins of vocatives

Many languages use pitch to express pragmatic meaning (henceforth ‘tune’). This requires segmental carriers with rich harmonic structure and high periodic energy, making vowels the optimal carriers of the tune. Tunes can be phonetically impoverished when there is a shortage of vowels, endangering the recovery of their function. This biases sound systems towards the optimisation of tune transmission by processes such as the insertion of vowels. Vocative constructions—used to attract and maintain the addressee’s attention—are often characterised by specific tunes. Many languages additionally mark vocatives morphologically. In this article, we argue that one potential pathway for the emergence of vocative morphemes is the morphological re-analysis of tune-driven phonetic variation that helps to carry pitch patterns. Looking at a corpus of 101 languages, we compare vocatives to structural case markers in terms of their phonological make-up. We find that vocatives are often characterised by additional prosodic modulation (vowel lengthening, stress shift, tone change) and contain substantially fewer consonants, supporting our hypothesis that the acoustic properties of tunes interact with segmental features and can shape the emergence of morphological markers. This fits with the view that the efficient transmission of information is a driving force in the evolution of languages, but also highlights the importance of defining ‘information’ broadly to include pragmatic, social, and affectual components alongside propositional meaning.

Homorganic Cluster Lengthening, Pre-Cluster Shortening and Preference-based change in Early English

This paper discusses the processes of Homorganic Cluster Lengthening (HCL) and Pre-Cluster Shortening (PCS) occurring in the late Old English and Early Middle English periods. These processes are responsible, respectively, for vowel-lengthening before voiced homorganic consonant clusters (OE bindan, feld, hund > LOE/EME bīnd, fēld, hūnd) and vowel shortening before other clusters (OE cēpte, fīfta, brōhte > ME kepte, fifte, brohte). This paper builds on reassessments of data by Minkova (2014) to contribute an account of HCL within the system of “preference laws” articulated by Vennemann (1988). This account attributes the motivation for HCL to preferences for syllable-internal transitions between nucleus and coda in order to explain the fine details of HCL; namely, the fact that HCL applies with higher frequency to high vowels followed nasals than to low/mid vowels and in a sporadic manner to front vowels followed by /l/ compared to back vowels. These differences are attributed to the application of the Coda and Nucleus Laws (Vennemann 1988: 25, 42), with additional proposals about the effect of velarization of /l/ in Old English, with comparison to PCS providing important context throughout.

A unified approach to domains in word- and phrase-level phonology

This paper discusses parallels between the conditioning of phonological processes at the word- and phrase-level. The approach taken here is a direct reference approach in which apparent mismatches between morphosyntactic domains and phonological domains are derived from the spell-out procedure. The analysis relies on two main ingredients, i) inclusion of the output of spell-out in subsequent cycles, and ii) layering of concatenation. Under (i), the phonological output of spell-out is visible and can be affected, however the internal structure is not. This can yield the effects of phonological domains extending beyond the morphosyntactic domain. Under (ii), processes are specified to apply at either early or late concatenation, where early and late concatenation are determined by the selectional relationship between the elements, limiting the application of phonological processes within the spell-out domain. This is first illustrated by the application of umlauts in Icelandic and then this approach is extended to penultimate vowel lengthening (PVL) in Zulu.