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.
A look at two constructions used for speech reporting in u̱t‑Maꞌin narrative texts and an overview of how the form of speech reporting constructions can extend beyond the bounds of the speech domain.
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.
The u̱t‑Maꞌin associative morpheme is in widespread use across different four distinct syntactic constructions. Understanding these diverse uses of the associative and the accompanying agreement marking is crucial to understanding the grammar of the language.
The morphological complexity of the U̱t‑Maꞌin noun class system holds the key to understanding the distinct elements of the two Progressive constructions.