Reduction of post-verbal pronoun to a tonal morpheme in Guro
This paper provides a description of tonal morphology of the verb in Guro (Southern Mande) taking into account behaviour of non-subject 3SG pronoun. The latter is special among other personal pronouns of Guro in that it is more prone to contract with other pronouns and grammatical markers, these contractions not being subject to regular phonetic rules of the language. When functioning as indirect object (occupying post-verbal position) the non-subject 3SG pronoun may optionally undergo reduction, at the same time changing the tone of the verb stem (in Guro verbal system, certain grammatical meanings are expressed via tone change). Thus, an overt segmental pronoun turns into a tonal morpheme.