I am an African linguist, primarily a Phonologist. My contributions to linguistics can be broadly categorized under three headings: language description, language documentation, and Phonological theory. My research can be characterized as a bridge between phonological description and phonological theory. My primary focus has been West African languages (mostly Nigerian languages) and what they teach us about phonological theory. I have an encyclopedic Phonological Grammar of Yoruba in press, to be published by Harvard U, and I have publications in several encyclopedic volumes.
In the area of language description, I have published research describing several aspects of the phonologies of Yoruba, Kalabari, Ibibio, Lokaa, Defaka, Nkoroo, Igbo (and other Nigerian languages), Kinande (D. R. Congo), and most recently Dan (Cote D’Ivoire). I am currently working on a description of Baatonum, spoken in Benin Republic and in Nigeria. The phenomena that I have studied and described include tone, vowel harmony, segment structure and word structure. I have publications on these languages in major theoretical Linguistics journals, as well as in journals devoted to African languages. These journals include Linguistic Inquiry, Lingua, Journal of Linguistics, The Linguistic Review, Canadian Journal of Linguistics, Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, the Journal of West African Languages, and others.
In my pursuit of what these languages teach us, I have made several very influential theoretical proposals based on Nigerian Languages, and they have formed the subjects of books and journal articles by other international linguists, and several Ph.D dissertations. To mention just a few, my featural affixation theory has been applied to consonant mutation in Pulaar, Seereer-Siin, and Wolof (McLaughlin 2000, 2002), and to German Sign Language (Roland Pfau 2005). The theory is included in a four-volume Linguistics encyclopedia titled “Companion to Phonology” (2001).
Secondly, my theory that there is a unit (tonal complex), which gathers tones together in the same way that a syllable gathers segments together, formed the basis of several journal articles by prominent linguists like Yip (2002), Xu (2002), and Leben (2004).
And thirdly, my proposal that in tone languages (and non-stress languages in general), phonological processes can show that there is a higher prosodic level of speech organization, called a foot, which gathers syllables together. This idea has opened up a new way of accounting for recalcitrant processes in many tone languages. The proposal, which is based on Ibibio (a Nigerian language), forms part of graduate teaching in Europe and the United States.
In 2007, I was awarded a four-year grant by the US National Science Foundation, as Principal Investigator, to document two endangered Nigerian languages, Defaka (spoken by less than 50 people) and Nkoroo (spoken by less than 2,000 people and encircling Defaka). Both of these languages are spoken on an island in Rivers state, Nigeria. The formal goal of the project was “to describe, record, and archive the grammar and traditions of Defaka and Nkoroo, two endangered languages spoken in the Niger delta region of southern Nigeria.” The documentation work is completed, and permanently archived at the Endangered Language Archive (ELAR), School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, with free access worldwide. The grammars and dictionaries of these languages are in progress, in collaboration with Bruce Connell and William Bennett.