Vowel elision and reduction in Bambara

International audience The goal of this study is to test instrumentally the hypothesis that Bambara dissyllabic feet are distributed into three types. The results of the study can be summarised as follows:— reduction and elision of a short V1 in disyllabic feet is phonetic, rather than phonological, and can be explained by phonotactics. Therefore, disyllabic feet with a short first vowel form just one type;— V1 length, although phonologically relevant, displays some instability between speakers;— in a disyllabic foot (at least when its boundaries coincide with word boundaries), length characteristics are in complementary distribution: if the first vowel is short, the second is long, and if the first vowel is long, the second is short. This phenomenon can be defined as "foot isochrony";— if the first vowel of a disyllabic foot is short, the duration of the second vowel depends on the position of the foot within the word: word-finally it is long, otherwise, it is short;— the difference between disyllabic feet types in Bambara can be exhaustively described by means of the length of the first vowel; there seems to be no need to postulate the existence of stress.