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Linguistics and English Language Department
 
Focus and Copular Constructions in Hausa 
A research monograph which explores the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic relations between these two apparently distinct types of construction in Hausa.  To be published this year by the Philological Society with Blackwell.

Special Inflection in Hausa and Coptic Wh-constructions
A joint project with Chris Reintges (Leiden), which explores the syntactic conditioning of 'relative marking' in Wh-constructions in these two Afroasiatic languages.  In 2002 we presented a paper to the Berkeley Linguistics Society special session on Afroasiatic languages, which is due to appear in the proceedings.  Last year we presented our work at the GLOW 2003 conference in Lund.

Prosody and Focus in Hausa
A new experimental study aimed at establishing the nature of the syntax-phonology interface in Hausa, this project is centered on the prosody of focus and focus-related constructions.  The study addresses questions such as : Do native speakers perceive ‘prosodic prominence’ in sentence-level utterances?  Are native speaker perceptions consistent with instrumental analysis of prominence? How might prominence be characterised phonetically and phonologically in Hausa?  What is the relationship between syntax and prosody in focus constructions? As Hausa is a tone language, this area has received little attention in the literature.

Copular Constructions in Chadic
As a long-term project, I am working towards developing a typology of copular constructions in the Chadic languages for which there is available data, with a view to establishing whether the copular element (although relatively rare in Chadic) can be related syntactically, morphologically or historically to a focus-marking element, as I have argued to be the case for Hausa. From a typological perspective, I am also interested in the cross-linguistic properties of constructions involving the copula; although the categorial status of the copula element varies from language to language, and although it may appear in various different types of construction, it is often associated with focus-marking. This is attested in a range of languages, both related and unrelated, from around the world.

Conceptual Metaphor in Hausa
A new collaboration with Dr Malami Buba (SOAS), an expert on deixis in Hausa.  Dr Buba’s research into the use of spatial deictics in abstract expressions (such as temporal expressions) along with my current investigation of cognitive linguistics together provide us with the foundations for a research project that explores for the first time in detail the conceptual basis of metaphorical expressions in Hausa.