Glottal stop

Glottal stops appear at the initial vowel of a word, but are not transcribed. Word-medially, vowel nasalization continues over the glottal stop. In rapid speech, the glottal stop is usually dropped, similar to how vowel hiatus gets dropped in Spanish.

Word medial glottal stops must be marked in writing.

Allophones

Sandhi

This section will describe all the morpho-phonological sandhi processes that affect Frafra.

Sonorants

Vowel harmony

Like many Mande languages, Frafra features vowel harmony.^[3] When suffixes are added to word roots, the vowel in the root selects whether the suffix will use the tense or lax form. The exception is suffixes ending in "-a" because /a/ is neutral in Frafra, meaning that it is only one form. Prefixes do not exist in Frafra.

Lexical Function

With low tones the word becomes a verb, whereas with high tones it is a noun.

Grammatical Function

The low tone on the preverbal tense marker wà indicates future, while the high tone on the same element indicates aspect.

Personal Pronouns

Emphatic Pronouns

Only emphatic pronouns can appear in focus positions, whereas all other pronouns cannot appear in those positions. Emphatic pronouns are used in exclusive contexts, in which the speaker indicates that only one thing is true and not the other.

Reciprocal Pronoun

The reciprocal pronoun is taaba and occurs postverbally.

Reflexive Pronouns

To form a reflexive pronoun in Gurenɛ the morphem -miŋa for singular or -misi for plural is attached to a particular personal pronoun. While in other Gur languages, the reflexive morphem is not sensitive to number, in Gurenɛ there exist two forms, one for each number.

Relative Pronouns

There are two relative pronouns, ti and n. The former relativizes subjects, while the latter is used to relativize objects. Both pronouns are not sensitive to number or animacy, while this is the case in other Gur languages such as Dagbani for instance.

Interrogative Pronouns

Interrogative pronouns can either occur sentence-initially or sentence-finally.

Demonstrative Pronouns

Each demonstrative pronoun refers to a single noun class.

Particles

There are a lot of particles in Gurenɛ, such that the total number is not fully clear.^[9] The following table provides an overview of the most common particles.^[8]

Verb

The verb in Gurenɛ consists of an obligatory stem or root, that can take one or more morphemes.^[8] Verbs appear either in the perfective or imperfective form, depending on its aspect. The perfective expresses actions in the present, whereas the imperfective denotes actions in the past or progressive.^[10]

Ex situ

In subject questions the question word occurs as the first element of the clause and can either function as the subject or as the agent of the clause.

In situ

In general, questions are formed by raising intonation of the final tone. Questions without an explicit question word have a clause-final question marker -ì.

Embedded

Questions can be embedded and are then preceded by the complementizer tí.

Multiple Questions

Question can also be formed by more than one question word. In these cases one question word occurs ex situ and the other(s) in situ. Again, a question word can only appear ex situ, if it replaces the subject or agent of the clause.

Long distance extraction

Question words in Gurenɛ can also cross clause boundaries, such that they originated in the embedded clause and have been fronted to the clause-initial position.