Gur (or Mabia) languages which are spoken in West Africa have so-called internally-headed relative clauses (IHRCs), but they have not received serious attention in syntactic and typological research on IHRCs. In this article, building on detailed first-hand data, we describe the syntax and semantics of IHRCs in five Gur languages: Buli, Dagaare, Dagbani, Gurene, and Kabiyé. It is demonstrated that their IHRCs refute the syntactic and semantic generalizations proposed in the literature (Gorbet 1976;Cole 1987;Grosu 2002;Watanabe 1991;. We also compare IHRCs in Gur and Japanese and argue that the existing semantic typology of IHRCs must be reconsidered, showing that properties of two types of IHRCs-restrictive and maximalizing IHRCS-do not necessarily show predicated correlations.

Though tongue-root vowel harmony in many Ghanaian languages has been described, there still remain many others which have received little or no description at all. Dagara, a dialect of Dagaare a Mabia language, is one of such dialects. This paper presents a description of Dagara tongue-root vowel harmony using Autosegmental Theory. The paper reveals that Dagara has bi-directional [ATR] harmony with [+ATR] vowels being the triggers of the harmonic process. In the progressive harmony processes, the [+ATR] feature of stem vowels causes [-ATR] vowels of suffixes to change to harmonize with them; in a regressive harmony process, [+ATR] vowels of the suffixes have dominance over those of stems and cause them to change to harmonize. The paper also shows that [f] is an opaque consonant, and blocks [+ATR] harmony spread from stems to suffix vowels. The opacity effect is however unidirectional as there is no evidence of such restriction in left-to-right harmony. The paper concludes that, there is a strict co-occurrence restriction on vowels of words in Dagara.

The paper analyzes the principal tonal contrasts and alternations in Buli from both synchronic and diachronic, comparative perspectives. The role of tone in the inflectional morphology as well as the phonetic implementation of tonal contrasts is also discussed.

Negative-polarity items in Buli, a Mabia (Gur) language spoken in Ghana, exhibit a mixed behavior between NCIs and NPIs (or between strong NPIs and weak NPIs). Thus, Buli presents a counterexample to Vallduvı's generalization that negative-polarity items come in two kinds. Adopting and extending the framework of Collins & Postal (2014) and Collins et al. (2017), we will show that the apparently mysterious mixed behavior of negative-polarity items in Buli can be explained by articulating an unary-NEG structure and syntax of reduplication.

No abstract