Building on existing corpora and new documentary fieldwork in West Africa, we are creating a multilingual comparative corpus. We present a technology toolkit and three parallel workflows that can be used to mobilize language materials for a variety of purposes, particularly for the discovery of discourse patterns in legacy materials.
Women of the u̱t‑Maꞌin community use a variety of languages in everyday life and in poetic performance. I present hypotheses about sociolinguistic dynamics that drive the use of particular languages in songs.
In this study I argue that the innovative suffix-marked nominative form is the result of reanalyzing a relative clause structure as main clause syntax. These clauses function are syntactically independent, and yet are somehow discourse dependent with limited occurrence in narrative texts.
Synchronic description of two progressive constructions, proposal of historical sources of the distinct morphological pieces, and a comparison of the U̱t‑Maꞌin Progressive Constructions with cognate elements from four Kainji language clusters.
A discourse based study of the distribution of verb forms in narrative texts with focus on the “unmarked” Bare Verb form that is used to progress the storyline — sequential main events in a narrative text.