Fronan has around 39,000 people speaking Fròʔò.
The city of Fronan is composed of six villages, namely Darakokaha, Offiakaha, Nyenankaha, Souroukaha, Tafolo, and Kanangonon. Note that these villages are considered to have the same dialect, although they maintain some dialectal distinctions. See Fig. 2 for the map showing the place where the language is spoken.
Fig. 2: Map showing the locality of Fronan, IGT University of Cocody, Abidjan (2008)
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Some works exist on Tagbana in general. Clamens (1952) provides an overview of the main grammatical properties of the language.
Herault and Mlanhoro (1973) worked on tàkper, a Tagbana dialect spoken in the city of Niakaramandougou. In their work, they presented a phonological sketch, including a tonal study, followed by a corpus of the data on which this sketch is based.
Katia Kamara C. (1988) contains a lexicon of Tagbana with translations in German called Lexikon der Tagbana-Sprache.
Yago (1989, 1991) wrote on Tafire, another Tagbana dialect. Yago respectively describes the noun class system and the vowel nasality of Tafire. He determined seven nominal classes of the Tafire based on a template made by a noun, a pronoun, and a presentative.
Mensah and Tchagbale (1993) introduce briefly the Tagbana languages and some Gur languages, especially the Gur languages of Côte d’Ivoire. Their work consists in several corpora and in descriptions of the phonological system of these languages.
Manessy (1996a,b) proposed an elaboration of the nominal classes of Tagbana.
The collection of the data consists of IPA transcripts of words. A transcribed word is retained as part of the corpus as if it was articulated identically by 8 persons out of 10, each obeying some criteria. Informants are 40–90 years old with a perfect command of the language; people whose mother tongue is the dialect of Fròʔò and who have a perfect command also of the languages of the neighbouring localities to avoid borrowing phenomena; people whose native language is the Fròʔò and who in addition to mastering the neighbouring languages also have a language competence of neighbouring dialects. This criterion would also avoid borrowing from elsewhere that we call far-borrowed and people whose mother tongue is Fròʔò and who mastered the French language perfectly to avoid misunderstandings and problems of interpretation.
The book has several chapters. Chapter 2 deals with the sounds of the dialect and the distinctive features. In this section, an overview of the distinctive features for the consonants and vowels of Fròʔò is proposed.
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Chapter 3 deals with the syllable structures. The first section provides an overview of the underlying syllables structure and syllabification in Fròʔò. The syllable is defined as a unit of prosodic organization located in the prosodic hierarchy between the mora and the foot, and it plays an important role in the phonology of Fròʔò. The second section deals with the phonotactics, the principles of the language that describe the constraints on strings of speech sounds or segments. The goal is not to discuss the existence of the syllable but to show the way sounds are organized in syllable forms and to address some phonological effects like vowel lengthening and features sharing in the voicing for example. The third section is about loanwords and their adaptation processes according to the phonotactic restrictions. Fròʔò imports many loanwords from French and neighbouring areas, and recently also some from English when specially a Fròʔò speaker is brought to speak English words in Fròʔò. The resyllabification process is the goal of the fourth section. Resyllabification is the result of vowel, liquid metathesis, and liquid deletion. The fifth section addresses and proposes some analyses on morphophonological process which consist in the fusion which is defined as a process where monosyllabic pronouns fused in one. The segments of the resulting syllable are the compromise of the features of the fused segments. In the sixth and last section, I focus on the theoretical analysis within the Optimality Theory (OT) framework on the fusion effects where I propose an analysis.
Chapter 4 introduces the nominal classes. Every noun belongs to one of the seven nominal classes of Fròʔò. The concept of nominal class refers to a system of noun categorization around a common set of phonological properties to a given group of nouns. Classes are determined by the phonological form of their associate functional morphemes, the morphemes in an agreement relation with the head noun. Nouns consist of a root and a class marker (CM) that can be overt or covert. A typical nominal root is mono- or disyllabic regardless of its class. If it is longer, it is most probably a compound.
Chapter 5 proposes a phonological and morphological analysis of the nominal classes of Fròʔò which, as mentioned, are primarily identified on the basis of their phonological properties. The first two sections deal, respectively, with word order in the nominal phrase and the functional morphemes. The dependent morphemes of a nominal domain acquire their phonological shape by fusion of different phonological features expressing morphological features. The analytic tool of this section is the Distributed Morphology (DM) theory. DM has a core mechanism called Vocabulary Insertion (VI) which translates the morphosyntactic features into phonological ones to achieve the surface forms. What is special about Fròʔò is that several abstract morphemes are realized in VI by ←28 | 29→distinctive features. Moreover, post-VI phonology is responsible for part of the phonological form of the morphemes. In other words, both VI and post-VI phonology are responsible for the phonological form of morphemes and words. It is also proposed that an autosegmental component should be added to VI to enhance the relevance of consonantal feature concord. Alliterative concord is illustrated with dependent morphemes of Classes 1, 3 and 5. The last two sections propose a theoretical account for the phonological form of the dependent functional morphemes and a discussion.
In Chapter 6, the derivational processes in the nominal domain of Fròʔò are illustrated, however limited to the morphological process of derivation. The first section of this chapter deals with the distinction between inflection and derivation. Derivation is defined as a process of affixation of a morpheme to another lexeme with co-occurrent change of its grammatical category. The first form of derivation discusses the denominal derivation, the second one deals with deverbal nominalization and the last one deals with the deadjectival derivational effects.
Two kinds of nouns must be distinguished in Fròʔò: the simplest nouns (called simplex nouns) and the complex nouns. The latter kind of nouns is the subject of Chapter 7. Simplex nouns (SN) are those that take only one lexical root and a category n0 defining morpheme, i.e. the class marker (CM). The complex nouns have more than one lexical root. The lexical roots come from different grammatical classes. Mostly made by nouns, one element in the CN modifies or describes the other one by adding a meaning to the second element, or by giving
