Bruce A Connell

Bruce A Connell
York University · Glendon College, Linguistics and Language Studies

PhD, Lings, Edinburgh 1991

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65
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Publications

Publications (65)
Preprint
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This chapter presents a substantially revised classification of the Cross River languages based on both lexical similarities and evidence from phonological innovations based in the comparative method. It begins with an overview of the traditionally accepted view of the putative Cross River languages. Central to the chapter is a presentation of the...
Preprint
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The Mambiloid languages have for over half a century been considered to be Bantoid languages, however little evidence has been offered to support this classification, or indeed for the internal integrity of the group. This chapter aims, first, to present background information about the putative Mambiloid group: its membership and their geographica...
Article
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This study investigated Intrinsic Vowel Pitch (If0) in the Belgian Limburg dialect of Hamont. Its main aim was to investigate a potential correlation between If0 and f0, which has been attested in previous research, especially on contour tone languages. The Hamont dialect is particularly interesting because it has a pitch accent distinction, but al...
Article
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Previous studies have highlighted how African genomes have been shaped by a complex series of historical events. Despite this, genome-wide data have only been obtained from a small proportion of present-day ethnolinguistic groups. By analyzing new autosomal genetic variation data of 1333 individuals from over 150 ethnic groups from Cameroon, Republ...
Article
This paper presents an analysis of grammatical gender and agreement in Durop, a language of the Upper Cross subgroup of Cross River. The data used are drawn from Kastelein (Kastelein, Bianca. 1994. A phonological and grammatical sketch of DuRop . Leiden: University of Leiden Scriptie), whose analysis treats gender as the singular – plural pairings...
Article
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As a contribution to the more general discussion on causes of language endangerment and death, we describe the language ecologies of four related languages (Bà Mambila [mzk]/[mcu], Sombә (Somyev or Kila) [kgt], Oumyari Wawa [www], Njanga (Kwanja) [knp]) of the Cameroon-Nigeria borderland to reach an understanding of the factors and circumstances th...
Chapter
A History of African Linguistics - edited by H. Ekkehard Wolff June 2019
Article
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Humans expanded out of Africa 50,000-70,000 years ago, but many details of this migration are poorly understood. Here, Haber et al. sequence Y chromosomes belonging to a rare African lineage and analyze... Present-day humans outside Africa descend mainly from a single expansion out ∼50,000–70,000 years ago, but many details of this expansion remain...
Article
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Bennett (2014) presents an analysis of phonotactic restrictions on nasal consonants in Obolo [ann] within the confines of Optimality Theory (OT) and Surface Correspondence (SC). My intention here is not to challenge Bennett’s OT/SC view of nasal consonants as being somehow wrong, though I think such accounts are not very satisfactory in understandi...
Chapter
Downstep is a pitch‐lowering phenomenon that is widely recognized to occur in tone languages, particularly those of sub‐Saharan Africa, in which it was first identified. It is also attested in several languages of the Americas, though only very rarely in Asia. The concept of downstep has also more recently been extended to account for phenomena ass...
Data
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Supplemental Sections and Figures. A document file containing Supplemental Sections 1-3 and Supplemental Figures S1-S12.
Data
Supplemental Tables. A spreadsheet file containing Supplemental Tables S1-S14.
Article
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Background: The Cross River region in Nigeria is an extremely diverse area linguistically with over 60 distinct languages still spoken today. It is also a region of great historical importance, being a) adjacent to the likely homeland from which Bantu-speaking people migrated across most of sub-Saharan Africa 3000-5000 years ago and b) the location...
Article
Full-text available
The Cross River region in Nigeria is an extremely diverse area linguistically with over 60 distinct languages still spoken today. It is also a region of great historical importance, being a) adjacent to the likely homeland from which Bantu-speaking people migrated across most of sub-Saharan Africa 3000-5000 years ago and b) the location of Calabar,...
Article
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Drawing on examples from a wide range of languages and social settings, The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World is the first single-volume collection surveying current and recent research trends in international sociolinguistics. With over 30 chapters written by leading authorities in the region concerned, all continents and the...
Article
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Kunama has been reported by different scholars as having two or three tones, downstep (or not), contrastive length of both consonants and vowels, and lexical stress. Despite this range of reported phenomena, little in-depth research into the prosodic system of Kunama has been undertaken. The aim of the present study is to report such a detailed inv...
Article
The immediate goal of the research reported here is to explore constraints on choice of language in the market of a small, highly multilingual village in Cameroon. In so doing, insight is provided both on the language ecology of the region in which the village is situated and on conditions of multilingualism in rural Africa, where the large majorit...
Article
Full-text available
Sex-specific genetic data favor a specific variant of the oral history of the kingdom of Nso' (a Grassfields city-state in Cameroon) in which the royal family traces its descent from a founding ancestress who married into an autochthonous hunter-gatherer group. The distributions of Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA variation in the Nso' in general...
Article
Sex‐specific genetic data favor a specific variant of the oral history of the kingdom of Nso′ (a Grassfields city‐state in Cameroon) in which the royal family traces its descent from a founding ancestress who married into an autochthonous hunter‐gatherer group. The distributions of Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA variation in the Nso′ in general...
Article
Mambila is a Bantoid language situated in the Nigeria-Cameroon borderland. This article presents basic information as to the classification of the language, its internal variation, and its linguistic structures. Mambila is a diverse language with approximately 20 different dialects. Among its interesting characteristics is its system of four level...
Article
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Bruce Connell did his undergraduate degree in Linguistics at the University of Ottawa, and an MSc in Speech Production and Perception at the University of Alberta. He then taught linguistics at the University of Calabar in Nigeria, where he became interested in African languages and cultures. A scholarship for doctoral studies took him to the Unive...
Article
Peter Ladefoged. Phonetic data analysis: An introduction to fieldwork and instrumental techniques. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 2003. Pp. xi + 196. $US34.95 (softcover). - Volume 51 Issue 1 - Bruce Connell
Article
Full-text available
The ability to digest the milk sugar lactose as an adult (lactase persistence) is a variable genetic trait in human populations. The lactase-persistence phenotype is found at low frequencies in the majority of populations in sub-Saharan Africa that have been tested, but, in some populations, particularly pastoral groups, it is significantly more fr...
Article
One important strand of research into the scaling of fundamental frequency has been concerned with the hypothesis that utterance length is a determining factor of initial pitch height, with longer utterances involving a higher initial F0 than that found in shorter utterances. Most work in this vein has been done on 'intonation' languages, with very...
Article
Full-text available
There has been considerable debate on the geographic origin of the human Y chromosome Alu polymorphism (YAP). Here we report a new, very rare deep-rooting haplogroup within the YAP clade, together with data on other deep-rooting YAP clades. The new haplogroup, found so far in only five Nigerians, is the least-derived YAP haplogroup according to cur...
Article
This paper explores the notion of fractals – structures that display a similar degree of complexity at whatever scale they may be viewed – in relation to investigating African history. A case study of developing ethnicities in the Mambila region of the Nigeria–Cameroon borderland is presented from a fractal perspective: five levels of the history o...
Article
Ega is an endangered language spoken in the south-central region of Côte d'Ivoire, in Divo Department. The precise number of speakers is not known at present; the 14th Ethnologue (Grimes 2000) reports 291 to 3,000, and notes that ‘the ethnic group is growing, but they are shifting to the Dida language because of intermarriage and other influences’....
Article
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Increasingly, the need to document endangered languages before they cease to be spoken and disappear is being recognized. Corresponding acknowledgement of the importance of detailed descriptions of the phonetics of such languages, however, is lagging behind. This study examines the phonetics of Cambap, a Bantoid language spoken in the Nigeria-Camer...
Article
A correlation between vowel height and fundamental frequency, whereby high vowels have higher F 0 than low vowels, is said to be universal. The available evidence suggests that this intrinsic F 0 (IF0) extends even to tone languages, which might be expected to control or constrain F 0. Little work, however, has been done on IF0 in tone languages of...
Article
Language contraction leading to language death is reported to have associated with it increased variation at different linguistic levels, including phonetics and phonology. This variation has been attributed not to influence from the ascendant language, but rather to lack of performance and a relaxation of sociolinguistic norms. This paper examines...
Article
The issue of the perception of lexical tone has been addressed mainly through studies of Southeast Asian languages which feature phonological contour tones as well as level tones. Little attention has been paid to African languages which have, almost exclusively, only level tones. This paper examines tone perception in Mambila, a Benue-Congo langua...
Article
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Njerep is a language on the edge of extinction. It is no longer spoken on a regular basis, nor is it even known well by anyone speaker. There are now, in fact, only five people who remember the language well enough to produce fragments of speech or who remember songs in the language. Our aim in this paper is to document the language to the extent p...
Article
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Article
Peter Ladefoged. Elements of Acoustic Phonetics, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1996. Pp. viii + 216. US$39.95 (hardcover), $14.95 (softcover). - Volume 44 Issue 1 - Bruce Connell
Article
Neil Smith and Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli. The Mind of a Savant: Language Learning and Modularity. Oxford: Blackwell. 1995. Pp. xviii + 243. US$49.95 (hardcover). - Volume 41 Issue 4 - Bruce Connell
Article
This paper presents a reconstruction of the consonant System of Proto-Lower Cross and examines the development of this parent System into those of the various present-day Lower Cross languages. The methodology used deviates somewhat from tradition in that greater attention tophonetic detail than usual is employed, following theprinciple that recons...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The claim that there is a hierarchy governing the attrition of nasals according to place of articulation is put to test in this paper by examination of cross linguistic data from two language groups which are unrelated genetically and geographically: the Romance dialects of Northern Italy and the Lower Cross group of South- Eastern Nigeria. Results...
Article
A great many languages of the world exhibit phenomena of FO DOWNTREND – phenomena whereby, other things being equal, the fundamental frequency (Fo) of the speaking voice declines over the course of an utterance. That much is uncontroversial; further details are either simply unknown or the subject of considerable debate. The purpose of the study re...
Article
The phonetic and phonological factors governing the realization of linguistic tone in speech have for some years been the focus of study by number of scholars and covering both tonal and non-tonal languages. While the basic effects of such factors as declination, downdrift, and downstep, among other influences, are now reasonably well understood, i...
Article
Determined in an experiment with 28 native Chinese speakers (aged 20–47 yrs) proficient in Mandarin how far the shape of a tone in Mandarin Chinese can be changed before it is consistently recognized as a different tone. Results show that perceptual changes in tone arose and that these changes corresponded generally with expectations based primaril...
Article
Full-text available
One common means of typologizing tone languages is according to their characteristics of pitch realization. In this paper I look at a set of these that has frequently been used in discussing the typology of tone languages in West Africa – the phonological and phonetic aspects of tone realization which have been grouped together as 'downtrends'. In...

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