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

In the winter of 1998, the Schrags and I conducted additional linguistic research
in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Unfortunately, civil unrest at the time prevented us from
travelling to D. R. Congo. Instead, we arranged for two mother-tongue Mono speakers,
Mr. Ama Geangozo Mbanza and Mr. Kilio Tembenekuzu, to travel from D. R. Congo to
Yaoundé in order to assist us in the research.
The data that we collected during the visits consist of field notes and audio
recordings of both elicited and natural speech. These data include word lists, phrases, and
texts of several discourse genres. The texts included traditional proverbs, folk stories, and
songs. Literacy materials in Mono that have been published to date include a folk story
book, a book on agriculture, two calendars including traditional Mono proverbs, and an
alphabet chart. In collecting data in Yaoundé, we focused on filling in gaps from our data
collected earlier in Bili. In addition, video recordings were made in Yaoundé in order to
document more thoroughly the labial flap. This dissertation relies predominantly on the
field notes collected during the two visits, but acoustic analysis based on the recordings is
presented to provide additional support for the transcribed data.
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