The paper deals with floating low tone and consonant voicing in Akebu, historically induced by the nasal velar ŋ. The phenomena manifest in combination as nominal and agreement markers in a number of noun classes, as well as in independent pronouns. I argue against the analysis of paired voiced consonants as positional variants of their voiceless counterparts after the floating low tone found in the previous literature. This study proposes that floating low tone is considered only as a special case of the low tone and does not differ from the low tone on overt markers in any respect. Accordingly, paired voiced consonants are viewed as independent phonemes, while keeping in mind that they have acquired their phonemic status recently.

This paper contributes to the typology of ditransitive constructions. Akebu (Kwa, Ghana-Togo mountain, West Africa) has four strategies of alignment of ditransitive verbs, if both theme and recipient objects are expressed: a neutral strategy, a possessive-like strategy, a strategy with a pronominal reprise and a ‘take’ serial verb construction strategy. The possessive-like strategy that is most standard in Akebu is rare in a cross-linguistic perspective and has not been attested in other Kwa languages. The factors that license a certain strategy are person, number and noun class of the theme and recipient and the internal structure of the theme noun phrase.

This article presents an overview of the numeral system in Akebu, a Kwa language of Togo. The Akebu numeral system is a decimal one and contains simple numerals from ‘1’ to ‘9’ and decimal bases for ‘10’, ‘100’, and ‘1,000’. The former have noun class agreement markers, while the latter do not. Only some noun classes are compatible with numerals, but among them there are both plural and singular classes.

Bulletin semestriel d'études linguistiques mandé | 2018 Varia Conjonctions de taxis en kla-dan Taxis conjunctions in the Kla-Dan language Таксисные союзы в языке кла-дан Nadezhda MakeevaElectronic version

The paper presents an overview of the ATR (advanced tongue root) feature, which is fairly widespread among the Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages of the Macro-Sudan Belt. The phonetic section provides a description of the articulatory and acoustic correlates of the feature. The review of the articulatory basis of the feature is presented in a historical perspective, from the fi rst cineradiographic studies of the 1960s till the laryngoscopic studies of the recent years. The paper shows how the introduction of new methods shifted attention from the tongue root movement, which had been given primacy in production of the contrast, to aryepiglotto-epiglottal constriction and a synergistic system of laryngeal articulations. The paper provides a description of several acoustic measures that have been found to correlate with the ATR feature: the frequency of the fi rst formant, the fi rst formant bandwidth, the spectral center of gravity, the relative intensity of the fi rst to the second formant. Similarities and differences between ATR, height and tenseness, which have been largely discussed in the literature, are also described in the paper. The phonological section provides an overview of ATR harmony systems. The main attention is paid to the strong crosslinguistic tendency for [+ATR] to function as the dominant value in languages with ATR contrast among high vowels, but for [−ATR] to be dominant in languages in which ATR is only contrastive for non-high vowels. The paper describes diff erent manifestations of ATR dominance (assimilatory, allophonic, and coalescent dominance) among two major types of underlying vowel inventories.