Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

For decades after Chomsky's(1957, 1965. 1995) claims on the hiercharchy of levels of adequacy, grammars were evaluated according to whether the have reached observational, descriptive or explanatory adequacy. This requirement has certainly led to newest metagrammars like OT and Minimalist Program.

Data collection and archiving were long relegated to the lowest level of language sciences, while explanation was set as the highest level. Meanwhile questions still remained latent as what constitutes a valid "explanation" in linguistics or prosody. Generative grammar developed the concept of "independent evidence" as an explanatory method that could be achieved through comparative or multilevel evidence.

The goal of my presentation will be to demonstrate how though the study or project of the prosody of African languages (in collaboration with Stanford university, the University of Bielefeld, and Sorbonne university) has helped to  develop much insight by taking account into these 4 levels of Chomsky's hierarchy, as independently relevant and of equal value.

My presentation will show firsty the state of art of the study of prosody of African languages and secondly how we have achieved a better understanding of the functioning and documentation of prosody by establishing reliable corpora, and using comparative studies to achieve a high level of explanation and language modelling.