Joola Fooñi

Abstract The present chapter is a sketch of the grammar of Joola Fooñi, an Atlantic language spoken in Lower Casamance (southwestern Senegal) by approximately 400,000 speakers. The chapter successively deals with phonology, morphophonology, morphology, and some elements of syntax. Joola Fooñi distinguishes two types of vowel according to the ±ATR feature, and the constraints on syllable structure can be schematized as (C)V(C(C)). Joola Fooñi is a noun class language in which a variety of words and phrases (including adjectives, demonstratives, interrrogatives, and verbs) are the targets of agreement phenomena in which nouns act as controllers. Class agreement mostly involves prefixes. Finite verb forms include an obligatory subject index, even in the presence of a subject NP, but the infinitive is also widely used in predicative function. The basic constituent order is SVO(X), with obliques typically introduced by prepositions. Multiple-object constructions are particularly productive.