9421362 The Bantu languages of Africa have played a major role in the development of current phonological theory. One reason for the continued importance of the phonology of Bantu languages is that de- spite a basic similarity between the languages, the abstract building blocks of grammars are arranged differently in each language, so that every language poses new empirical puzzles. Bantu languages are particularly rich in the area of prosodic phenomena tones, vowel length and syllabification and often have highly developed systems of prosodic rules that apply at the sentence level. While quality descriptions of the phonology of perhaps a dozen Bantu languages are available, there are around 400 Bantu languages spoken in Africa, so one can accurately say that the surface has only been scratched in studying the phonology of Bantu languages. The goal of this three-year project is to provide a more solid empirical foundation for the study of the grammatical structure of Bantu languages, focusing on problems in the phonology of certain languages spoken in Southern Kenya, Northern Tanzania and Southern Uganda. Four languages are targeted for extensive investigation in this project, specifically Kikerewe, Runyankore, Bukusu and Kikamba. None of these languages has received adequate attention in terms of their phonological systems, especially in terms of tone and syllable structure. Working with native speakers of these languages, the research team will elicit lexical items and grammatical paradigms, including inflectional paradigms and phrasal constructions, to determine the range of phonological alternations attested in these languages. Simultaneously these data will be analyzed; hypotheses will be formed regarding the principles which explain the distribution of the available data. By collecting and analyzing the data simultaneously, errors and omissions in the data will be detected quickly and hypotheses can be tested against a wider range of const ructions. The data and analyses generated by this project will then be disseminated as a special issue of the Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics, and through journal articles and monograph-length publications.
