Describing Mòòré: a language of Burkina Faso

Abstract

Designed for a non-specialist audience, this poster was designed to highlight ongoing research that continued beyond the Linguistic Field Methods sequence. In that three-term class, PhD students have to describe the system of a language unknown to them, starting from the smaller units (phonetics and phonology, i.e. sound inventory) up to the larger ones (syntax, i.e. sentence structure). The language under investigation was Mòòré, a Gur language spoken in Burkina Faso. Our consultant was a native speaker of Mòòré and a current student at the University of Oregon. During the first term we worked together toward a consensus on the sound system of the language. After the first term, every student in the class conducted linguistic research on a specific area of the Moore language.

Several of us have continued research with our consultant following the completion of the structured course in order to develop the analysis more fully . We have two goals: (i) collect missing data and (ii) improve the quality of our research. The overwhelming majority of linguistic documentation on Mòòré is in French. Our collective work represents: (i) a contribution to general knowledge about the structure of this language; (ii) an exploration of topics which have not been addressed in the available literature (or have been under a different theoretical framework); (iii) a resource for typological work on Gur languages; and (iv) a chance for non-French-speaking scholars to become interested/involved in Mòòré.

Title
Describing Mòòré: a language of Burkina Faso
Publication
6th Annual Graduate Research Forum at the University of Oregon
Date
February 2015

Citable as

Pacchiarotti, Sara, Rebecca Paterson, Amos Teo. 2015. Describing Mòòré: a language of Burkina Faso. Poster presented at the 6th Annual Graduate Research Forum, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon.

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Sara Pacchiarotti
Sara Pacchiarotti
Linguist

Becky turned me into an Africanist…

Rebecca Paterson
Rebecca Paterson
Affiliated

My research interests include field linguistics, grammatical description, and translation.

Amos Teo
Amos Teo
Linguist & Data Analyst

I am a linguist, language nerd, and data analyst. I have worked with African and South East Asian languages.

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