Morphological Complexity in Nuer

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A notorious complicating factor in language comes from inflectional morphology, which is all the more striking because some languages have it and others do not. In English, for example, verbs inflect, and alongside a form such as 'sing', a speaker must know 'sings', 'sang', 'sung' and 'singing'. In Mandarin Chinese, where verbs do not inflect, a speaker only needs to know one form (chàng). But inflection is not just a matter of learning multiple forms -- speakers also need to negotiate a network of unpredictable and ambiguous relationships. For instance, English speakers do not just need to know that a verb must have a simple past tense form, they need to know that the past tense forms of 'sing', 'fling', 'bring' and 'ping' are all constructed in different ways ('sang', 'flung', 'brought' and 'pinged'), and that while 'sang' and 'hang' rhyme, one is a past tense form and the other present. While the inflectional system of English is still fairly simple, in other languages things may get considerably more complex.One of the world's most extreme examples comes from Nuer, a language of the West Nilotic branch of the Nilo-Saharan language family, mainly spoken in the Republic of South Sudan. This complexity is not due so much to a large number of forms, but rather to their unpredictability and internal structure. This can be clearly seen in the case suffixes. On the face of it, the system is quite simple. There just two suffixes, -ka in the singular and -ni in the plural. But their behaviour is quite baffling, because their meaning varies according to the individual noun; for example, -ni can function as a genitive case suffix for some nouns, as a locative case for others, or as both, or even as a general plural suffix with no case-marking function at all. Speakers must learn how to use and recognize these forms, and select the correct function from this range of competing options. Besides suffixation, nouns may also inflect through various internal changes, as with English 'foot' versus 'feet'. But in Nuer this goes well beyond such vocalic alternations, and takes advantage of a rich system of prosodic features such as length, tone, and phonation type (breathy voice versus creaky voice). As with the suffixes, it is not possible to establish a fixed function for these features. For example, the genitive case of 'cow' is formed by vowel lengthening (yang ~ yaang) while that of 'person' is formed by shortening (raan ~ ran). Taken together, the patterns of suffixation and word-internal changes constitute a system whose complexity is matched by few languages in the world. This is of major interest both to the study of language and of cognition more generally, because the reigning linguistic and psychological models of inflection are based on systems which are considerably simpler.But while we know enough about the language to appreciate the challenges it poses, we lack any detailed information. Very little about it is known about Nuer outside the speech community, and the existing descriptions are sketchy at best. Therefore, in this project we aim to produce the first comprehensive description of the inflectional morphology of Nuer, based on original fieldwork, at the same time illuminating aspects of its sound system, syntax and historical development. Alongside the structural complexities of the system, the prosodic system poses particular descriptive challenges of its own, in which the overlapping effects of tone, phonation type and the typologically unusual three-way vowel length distinction must be untangled through careful acoustic measurements. The results of this investigation will be important to students of language and the human mind, and will also have value to the speaker community in the development of orthographic standards, an ongoing process in the newly independent South Sudan.