the university of chicago the phonology and ... - SIL International

CHAPTER 9
CONCLUSION
In this section, I highlight briefly what I consider to be the interesting aspects of
Mono phonology and morphology.
Among the consonants, the labial flap is of interest due to its limited geographic
distribution (central and southeastern Africa) and the fact that it has not received much
attention in the literature. The default articulation of the labial flap in Mono is a “bilabial
flap with egressive lung air”, unusual because the sound is most often described as
labiodental cross-linguistically. I also note that a backing of the tongue co-occurs with the
sound. There are four acoustic correlates for the sound: (1) a brief closure of less than 30
ms, (2) rising F1 and F2 transitions after release, (3) short duration of formant transitions
after release, and (4) a slow, gradual drop in F2 before the closure.
The Mono vowel system lacks a front low vowel. This phenomenon is attested in
other African languages, but it is unusual in that is leads to a smaller inventory of front
vowels than back vowels, contradicting a universal proposed by Crothers (1978). He
claimed that the number of height distinctions in front vowels is greater than or equal to
the number in back vowels. The Mono vowel system is also unusual in the fact that it has
eight vowels.
Mono has three levels tones. Tone has both a lexical and a grammatical function.
Tonal distinctions identify several TAM categories in the language. In addition, a tonal
melody is attested on certain locative adverbs, and the C= C=- C= prefix on prepositions
undergoes tonal polarity.
173