Baga Mandori

Abstract This chapter presents a grammatical sketch of Baga Mandori—a language formerly classified as Atlantic—which emerged from documentary linguistic work with the communities of Bitonko, Bel-Bel, and Dobali on the northern Guinean Coast. The analyses in this contribution are preliminary, owing to an untimely interruption of the research programme caused by the Ebola outbreak of 2013–2015. Baga Mandori is a Mel language that features an elaborate noun class system, a set of verbal derivations, and two different sets of subject markers on the verb. Interestingly, Baga Mandori provides data that calls into question Zwicky and Pullum’s (1986) principle of phonology-free syntax.