A typological portrait of Mano, Southern Mande

Abstract

This paper provides a typological survey of Mano, a Mande language of Guinea and Liberia. It sketches a linguistic portrait of Mano as a representative member of the Southern branch of the Mande family. The family features shared by Mano include S-Aux-O-V-X word order, the parallelism between nominal and verbal syntax, and the ubiquity of passive lability. The branch features include rich tonal morphology, the unstable character of nasal consonants, and rich pronominal paradigms, including auxiliaries that index the person and number of the subject. Some of the features presented here have not been sufficiently analyzed in the Mandeist literature, so it is unclear how unusual Mano is in comparison to other Mande languages in terms of the large class of inalienably possessed nouns, or the clause-level nominalization that may include another clause as its constituent. Finally, some properties are almost certainly specific to Mano, such as the dedicated tonal forms used in conditional clauses. This paper puts Mano in its typological context, elaborating on those features which are cross linguistically well attested versus those which are cross linguistically rare.

Mano correlatives are non-subordinating

“…Mano makes use of various morphosyntactic and prosodic means for clausecombining and subordination, including conjunctions, such as yé 'when' in (7) To mark some dependent clauses, dedicated auxiliary series and verbal forms are used. For example, for forms used in conditional clauses, see Khachaturyan (2020b). The joint auxiliary series is also widely used to express sequences of events or, as in (8), events occurring simultaneously (typically concerning coreferential subjects, but not necessarily).…”

Common Ground in Demonstrative Reference: The Case of Mano (Mande)

“…Mano (mááwè) is a Southern Mande language spoken by 305,000 people in Liberia (Ethnologue 2 ) and, according to different estimations, by 66,000 (Guinean census performed in 2014, Bah and Bangoura, 2017) and 95,000 (Ethnologue) in Guinea. A grammar of Mano can be found in Khachaturyan (2015), and for a typological portrait of the language, see Khachaturyan (2020a). The demonstrative system is subject to dialectal variation; for a preliminary account, see Khachaturyan (2018a).…”