Laura Mcpherson
Biographic Data
| ID | 221514 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laura Mcpherson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laura |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcpherson |
| SIGNATURE | MCPHERSON L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Dartmouth College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9027-0375 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Poko postlexical tone requires serial, directional evaluation
Poko (Skou, Papua New Guinea) displays a complex tone system, with three contrastive levels, toneless syllables and floating tones. Lexical tone is characterised by robust patterns of anti-alignment, wherein high (H) tones may not be initial and low (L) tones may not be final (McPherson & Dryer 2021; McPherson 2022). This article analyses the postlexical realisation of tone, especially the behaviour of floating tones, rising tones and toneless sy…
The acquisition of verbal tone in Seenku (Mande, Burkina Faso)
The literature on the acquisition of tone is dominated by East Asian languages, but as the characteristics of tone systems vary across language families, many tonal phenomena remain virtually unstudied. One such phenomenon is grammatical tone, uncommon in East Asia but quite prevalent in African languages. This paper presents the first analysis of grammatical tone acquisition in Seenku (Mande, Burkina Faso), focusing on verbs. Seenku’s tone syste…
Akan tone encoding across musical modalities
Musical surrogate languages like talking drums remain understudied in the linguistics literature, despite their close connection with the phonetics and phonology of the spoken language. African surrogate languages tend to be based on tone, making them a unique angle for studying a language’s tonal system. This paper looks at the encoding of Akan tone in three instrumental surrogate languages: the atumpan drums, the seperewa harp, and the abɛntia …
Theoretical approaches to grammatical tone
Tone is distinct from other phonological phenomena both qualitatively and quantitatively (Hyman 2011), and has been instrumental in shaping phonological theory in many ways. However, the contributions to current linguistic theory of “grammatical tone’ (GT) – a type of non-concatenative morphology where a morpheme is expressed at least in part by tone and/or tone changes – have been less apparent. In this paper, we take stock of the types of GT pa…
Categoricity, Variation, and Gradience in Sambla Balafon Segmental Encoding
This paper analyzes the musical surrogate encoding of Seenku (Mande, Burkina Faso) syllable structure on the balafon, a resonator xylophone used by the Sambla ethnicity. The elements of syllable structure that are encoded include vowel length, sesquisyllabicity, diphthongs, and nasal codas. Certain elements, like vowel length and sesquisyllabicity, involve categorical encoding through conscious rules of surrogate speech, while others, like diphth…
Seenku
Seenku (ISO 639-3: sos) is a Western Mande language of the Samogo group, whose other members include languages like Dzùùngoo (Solomiac 2014), Jowulu (Djilla, Eenkhoorn & Eenkhoorn-Pilon 2004), and Duungooma (Hochstetler 1996), spoken on either side of the Mali-Burkina Faso border. The endonymic language name Seenku [sɛ̃́ː-kû] (also spelled on Ethnologue as Seeku) literally means 'thing of the Sɛ̃ː ethnicity', but it is widely known to outsiders a…
The role of music in documenting phonological grammar: Two case studies from West Africa
Though the study of metrics and poetic verse has long informed phonological theory, studies of musical adaptation remain on the fringe of linguistic theory. In this paper, I argue that musical adaptation provides a unique window in speakers’ knowledge of their phonological system, which can provide crucial evidence for phonological theory. I draw on two case studies from my fieldwork in West Africa: tonal textsetting of sung folk music in Tommo S…
Tone: The present state and future potential
Tone: The present state and future potential* Laura McPherson As a tonologist, I have often heard very accomplished colleagues express trepidation toward tone, with statements like ‘Tone is too hard’ or ‘I don’t do tone’. We have been pushing back against this viewpoint for decades. Consider the following quote from Welmers (1959), which he repeated in 1973 and which Hyman (2011) quoted as still relevant over fifty years later: Most language stud…
Musical adaptation as phonological evidence: Case studies from textsetting, rhyme, and musical surrogates
Music and language are both inherently human, rule-governed systems. Language-based music, including vocal music and musical surrogate languages, offers the opportunity to look at how musical and linguistic grammars interact and how linguistic structure is adapted to another modality. This article focuses on how this musical adaptation of language can provide valuable evidence for phonological structure and theory, drawing on case studies from te…
The Talking Balafon of the Sambla: Grammatical Principles and Documentary Implications
This article makes the case for linguists to take part in the study of musical surrogate languages, where linguistic form is transposed onto music. It draws on the case study of the Sambla balafon, a West African resonator xylophone. Seenku (Northwestern Mande, Samogo), the language of the Sambla people, has a highly complex tonal system, whose four contrastive levels and multiple contour tones are encoded musically in the notes of the balafon , …
Tone-tune association in Tommo So (Dogon) folk songs: Supplemental Material
Tone-tune association in Tommo So (Dogon) folk songs
This article explores the relationship between linguistic tone and musical melody in Tommo So, a Dogon language of Mali. Most fundamentally, contrary mappings (rising tone on falling music, or vice versa) are strongly penalized, while oblique mappings (flat tone on changing music, or vice versa) are largely tolerated. Strictness of mapping is further modulated by several factors, including whether the tones straddle a word boundary, whether their…
Multiple feature affixation in Seenku plural formation
Relating application frequency to morphological structure: The case of Tommo So vowel harmony
We describe three vowel-harmony processes in Tommo So and their interaction with morphological structure. The verbal suffixes of Tommo So occur in a strict linear order, establishing a Kiparskian hierarchy of distance from the root. This distance is respected by all three harmony processes; they ‘peter out’, applying with lower frequency as distance from the root increases. The function relating application rate to distance is well fitted by fami…
Phrasal grammatical tone in the Dogon languages: The role of constraint interaction
Cumulativity and ganging in the tonology of Awa suffixes: Supplementary materials
This article revives old descriptive data on Awa, a Papuan language of the Kainantu group. The tonal system was described in detail in a paper by Loving (1973), where he reports a series of toneless noun suffixes, falling into six classes depending on their tonal alternations when combined with a noun root. This article demonstrates that the suffixes are best understood as carrying lexical tone; the alternations in form arise from the interaction…
Cumulativity and ganging in the tonology of Awa suffixes
This article revives old descriptive data on Awa, a Papuan language of the Kainantu group. The tonal system was described in detail in a paper by Loving (1973), where he reports a series of toneless noun suffixes, falling into six classes depending on their tonal alternations when combined with a noun root. This article demonstrates that the suffixes are best understood as carrying lexical tone; the alternations in form arise from the interaction…
Tonosyntax and reference restriction in Dogon NPs
Lexical tone melodies of words and word strings in Dogon languages are overridden by syntactically conditioned word-level or broader tone overlays. In Ben Tey and other Dogon languages, certain NP-internal elements-possessors, adjectives, relative clauses, demonstratives-are controllers, imposing overlays such as {L} and {HL} on adjacent words or word strings (the targets). Other elements (nonsingular quantifiers, discourse-functional morphemes) …
Cognitive Set and Lexicalization Strategy in Dogon Action Verbs
Dogon languages lexicalize action verbs with obligatory reference to manner and/or process. This contrasts with English and "Standard Average European," which (in neutral contexts) profile result and/or function. Many common English verbs like carry and eat correspond to sets of Dogon verbs with senses like 'carry on back' and 'munch'. The pattern cuts across many semantic domains and constitutes a generalized lexicalization strategy, which sugge…
Phrasal grammatical tone in the Dogon languages: The role of constraint interaction
Tonosyntax and reference restriction in Dogon NPs
Lexical tone melodies of words and word strings in Dogon languages are overridden by syntactically conditioned word-level or broader tone overlays. In Ben Tey and other Dogon languages, certain NP-internal elements-possessors, adjectives, relative clauses, demonstratives-are controllers, imposing overlays such as {L} and {HL} on adjacent words or word strings (the targets). Other elements (nonsingular quantifiers, discourse-functional morphemes) …
Tone-tune association in Tommo So (Dogon) folk songs
This article explores the relationship between linguistic tone and musical melody in Tommo So, a Dogon language of Mali. Most fundamentally, contrary mappings (rising tone on falling music, or vice versa) are strongly penalized, while oblique mappings (flat tone on changing music, or vice versa) are largely tolerated. Strictness of mapping is further modulated by several factors, including whether the tones straddle a word boundary, whether their…
Multiple feature affixation in Seenku plural formation
The Talking Balafon of the Sambla: Grammatical Principles and Documentary Implications
This article makes the case for linguists to take part in the study of musical surrogate languages, where linguistic form is transposed onto music. It draws on the case study of the Sambla balafon, a West African resonator xylophone. Seenku (Northwestern Mande, Samogo), the language of the Sambla people, has a highly complex tonal system, whose four contrastive levels and multiple contour tones are encoded musically in the notes of the balafon , …
Seenku
Seenku (ISO 639-3: sos) is a Western Mande language of the Samogo group, whose other members include languages like Dzùùngoo (Solomiac 2014), Jowulu (Djilla, Eenkhoorn & Eenkhoorn-Pilon 2004), and Duungooma (Hochstetler 1996), spoken on either side of the Mali-Burkina Faso border. The endonymic language name Seenku [sɛ̃́ː-kû] (also spelled on Ethnologue as Seeku) literally means 'thing of the Sɛ̃ː ethnicity', but it is widely known to outsiders a…
Cumulativity and ganging in the tonology of Awa suffixes
This article revives old descriptive data on Awa, a Papuan language of the Kainantu group. The tonal system was described in detail in a paper by Loving (1973), where he reports a series of toneless noun suffixes, falling into six classes depending on their tonal alternations when combined with a noun root. This article demonstrates that the suffixes are best understood as carrying lexical tone; the alternations in form arise from the interaction…
Cognitive Set and Lexicalization Strategy in Dogon Action Verbs
Dogon languages lexicalize action verbs with obligatory reference to manner and/or process. This contrasts with English and "Standard Average European," which (in neutral contexts) profile result and/or function. Many common English verbs like carry and eat correspond to sets of Dogon verbs with senses like 'carry on back' and 'munch'. The pattern cuts across many semantic domains and constitutes a generalized lexicalization strategy, which sugge…
Tonosyntax and reference restriction in Dogon NPs
Lexical tone melodies of words and word strings in Dogon languages are overridden by syntactically conditioned word-level or broader tone overlays. In Ben Tey and other Dogon languages, certain NP-internal elements-possessors, adjectives, relative clauses, demonstratives-are controllers, imposing overlays such as {L} and {HL} on adjacent words or word strings (the targets). Other elements (nonsingular quantifiers, discourse-functional morphemes) …
Relating application frequency to morphological structure: The case of Tommo So vowel harmony
We describe three vowel-harmony processes in Tommo So and their interaction with morphological structure. The verbal suffixes of Tommo So occur in a strict linear order, establishing a Kiparskian hierarchy of distance from the root. This distance is respected by all three harmony processes; they ‘peter out’, applying with lower frequency as distance from the root increases. The function relating application rate to distance is well fitted by fami…
Phrasal grammatical tone in the Dogon languages: The role of constraint interaction
Cumulativity and ganging in the tonology of Awa suffixes: Supplementary materials
This article revives old descriptive data on Awa, a Papuan language of the Kainantu group. The tonal system was described in detail in a paper by Loving (1973), where he reports a series of toneless noun suffixes, falling into six classes depending on their tonal alternations when combined with a noun root. This article demonstrates that the suffixes are best understood as carrying lexical tone; the alternations in form arise from the interaction…
Cumulativity and ganging in the tonology of Awa suffixes
This article revives old descriptive data on Awa, a Papuan language of the Kainantu group. The tonal system was described in detail in a paper by Loving (1973), where he reports a series of toneless noun suffixes, falling into six classes depending on their tonal alternations when combined with a noun root. This article demonstrates that the suffixes are best understood as carrying lexical tone; the alternations in form arise from the interaction…
Multiple feature affixation in Seenku plural formation
Tone-tune association in Tommo So (Dogon) folk songs: Supplemental Material
Tone-tune association in Tommo So (Dogon) folk songs
This article explores the relationship between linguistic tone and musical melody in Tommo So, a Dogon language of Mali. Most fundamentally, contrary mappings (rising tone on falling music, or vice versa) are strongly penalized, while oblique mappings (flat tone on changing music, or vice versa) are largely tolerated. Strictness of mapping is further modulated by several factors, including whether the tones straddle a word boundary, whether their…
The role of music in documenting phonological grammar: Two case studies from West Africa
Though the study of metrics and poetic verse has long informed phonological theory, studies of musical adaptation remain on the fringe of linguistic theory. In this paper, I argue that musical adaptation provides a unique window in speakers’ knowledge of their phonological system, which can provide crucial evidence for phonological theory. I draw on two case studies from my fieldwork in West Africa: tonal textsetting of sung folk music in Tommo S…
Tone: The present state and future potential
Tone: The present state and future potential* Laura McPherson As a tonologist, I have often heard very accomplished colleagues express trepidation toward tone, with statements like ‘Tone is too hard’ or ‘I don’t do tone’. We have been pushing back against this viewpoint for decades. Consider the following quote from Welmers (1959), which he repeated in 1973 and which Hyman (2011) quoted as still relevant over fifty years later: Most language stud…
Musical adaptation as phonological evidence: Case studies from textsetting, rhyme, and musical surrogates
Music and language are both inherently human, rule-governed systems. Language-based music, including vocal music and musical surrogate languages, offers the opportunity to look at how musical and linguistic grammars interact and how linguistic structure is adapted to another modality. This article focuses on how this musical adaptation of language can provide valuable evidence for phonological structure and theory, drawing on case studies from te…
The Talking Balafon of the Sambla: Grammatical Principles and Documentary Implications
This article makes the case for linguists to take part in the study of musical surrogate languages, where linguistic form is transposed onto music. It draws on the case study of the Sambla balafon, a West African resonator xylophone. Seenku (Northwestern Mande, Samogo), the language of the Sambla people, has a highly complex tonal system, whose four contrastive levels and multiple contour tones are encoded musically in the notes of the balafon , …
Seenku
Seenku (ISO 639-3: sos) is a Western Mande language of the Samogo group, whose other members include languages like Dzùùngoo (Solomiac 2014), Jowulu (Djilla, Eenkhoorn & Eenkhoorn-Pilon 2004), and Duungooma (Hochstetler 1996), spoken on either side of the Mali-Burkina Faso border. The endonymic language name Seenku [sɛ̃́ː-kû] (also spelled on Ethnologue as Seeku) literally means 'thing of the Sɛ̃ː ethnicity', but it is widely known to outsiders a…
Categoricity, Variation, and Gradience in Sambla Balafon Segmental Encoding
This paper analyzes the musical surrogate encoding of Seenku (Mande, Burkina Faso) syllable structure on the balafon, a resonator xylophone used by the Sambla ethnicity. The elements of syllable structure that are encoded include vowel length, sesquisyllabicity, diphthongs, and nasal codas. Certain elements, like vowel length and sesquisyllabicity, involve categorical encoding through conscious rules of surrogate speech, while others, like diphth…
Theoretical approaches to grammatical tone
Tone is distinct from other phonological phenomena both qualitatively and quantitatively (Hyman 2011), and has been instrumental in shaping phonological theory in many ways. However, the contributions to current linguistic theory of “grammatical tone’ (GT) – a type of non-concatenative morphology where a morpheme is expressed at least in part by tone and/or tone changes – have been less apparent. In this paper, we take stock of the types of GT pa…
Akan tone encoding across musical modalities
Musical surrogate languages like talking drums remain understudied in the linguistics literature, despite their close connection with the phonetics and phonology of the spoken language. African surrogate languages tend to be based on tone, making them a unique angle for studying a language’s tonal system. This paper looks at the encoding of Akan tone in three instrumental surrogate languages: the atumpan drums, the seperewa harp, and the abɛntia …
The acquisition of verbal tone in Seenku (Mande, Burkina Faso)
The literature on the acquisition of tone is dominated by East Asian languages, but as the characteristics of tone systems vary across language families, many tonal phenomena remain virtually unstudied. One such phenomenon is grammatical tone, uncommon in East Asia but quite prevalent in African languages. This paper presents the first analysis of grammatical tone acquisition in Seenku (Mande, Burkina Faso), focusing on verbs. Seenku’s tone syste…
Poko postlexical tone requires serial, directional evaluation
Poko (Skou, Papua New Guinea) displays a complex tone system, with three contrastive levels, toneless syllables and floating tones. Lexical tone is characterised by robust patterns of anti-alignment, wherein high (H) tones may not be initial and low (L) tones may not be final (McPherson & Dryer 2021; McPherson 2022). This article analyses the postlexical realisation of tone, especially the behaviour of floating tones, rising tones and toneless sy…
Linguistics (18 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (12 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (8 works) · Grammar (7 works) · History (7 works) · Tone (literature) (7 works)