Thesiss

This dissertation is an historical look at the politics of language of the Pulaar in Mauritania, West Africa. An overview of the linguistic characteristics of Pulaar and the cultural geography of the Pulaar is provided. Historically, the Pulaar have had to face racist attacks of…

From the early stage of Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince, Alan and Paul Smolensky (1993): Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar . [ROA: 537-0802: http://roa.rutgers.edu], McCarthy, John J. and Alan Prince (1995). Faithfulness and reduplicative identity. I…

In this thesis, I investigate the clause structure of Pulaar, an Atlantic language spoken in Senegal. Specifically, I look at the ordering of functional heads under the hypothesis on the Hierarchy of Functional Heads in Cinque (1999). I also look at the derivation of these funct…

The problem. This is a study of two bilingual communities in Northern Senegal. In these rural communities some level of bilingual competence in the two languages in contact was expected. The languages are Wolof and Pulaar (a dialect of Fula). Wolof is the subjects' first languag…