SIL Electronic Book Reviews 2003-014
URL: http://www.sil.org/silebr/silebr2003-014
A grammar of Sisaala-Pasaale
Language Monographs 4. Legon, Ghana: Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, 1999. Pp. 201.
Reviewed by Uwe Seibert
University of Colorado at Boulder
The book under review is a grammatical sketch of the Pasaale variety of Sisaala, a.k.a. Southern Sisaala. Sisaala is a cluster of lects spoken in northwestern Ghana, reaching into Burkina Faso. It belongs to the Grusi subgroup of Central Gur.
There have been a few publications on various Sisaala lects, e.g., Blass 1975, 1990; Rowland and Rowland 1965, and Rowland 1966. One of the authors of the book under review, Mike Toupin, wrote a phonological description of Sisaala-Pasaale (Toupin 1995).
Since the phonology of Pasaale was already described by Toupin 1995, the authors treat only morphology and syntax. Their corpus consists of a body of recorded texts, conversations, and elicited materials. Their description is prose-like and not following any particular formalism. According to the authors and judging by the look of some of the tables, their theoretical base is tagmemics.
The description of clause and sentence types is very detailed and there is an extensive treatment of three discourse particles.
Throughout the different chapters the authors give plenty of examples. In the appendix there is an interlinearized text.
Given the scarcity of grammatical sketches of African minority languages, the three authors must be commended for their work.
One point of criticism is the authors' decision not to mark tone for most of the examples and to use only seven vowel symbols for a nine-vowel system. Thus, <title> stands for both [ɪ] and [i] and <u> stands for both [u] and [ʊ]. What makes this even more confusing is their use of the acute accent to mark the [–ATR] vowels in cases of possible confusion. Thus, <í> represents [ɪ] and not a high front vowel carrying a high tone, likewise <ú> represents [ʊ] and not a high back vowel carrying a high tone. This may be a valuable decision for a practical orthography of the language, but for a grammatical description that will be read by many nonspeakers of the language, they should have used some kind of phonemic writing.
References
Blass, Regina (compiler). 1975. Sisaala-English, English-Sisaala dictionary. Tamale, Ghana: Institute of Linguistics.
Blass, Regina. 1990. Relevance relations in discourse: A study with special reference to Sissala. (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 55). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rowland, Ronald and Muriel Rowland. 1965. Collected field reports on the phonology of Sisala. (Collected Language Notes, 2.) Accra, Ghana: Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana.
Rowland, Ronald. 1966. A short dictionary of Isaalang. Accra, Ghana: Institute of Linguistics.
Toupin, Mike. 1995. The phonology of Sisaala-Pasaale. (Collected Language Notes, 22.) Legon, Ghana: I.A.S.