Coerced weight and its consequences in Bondu So verbs

Bondu So (Dogon, Mali) displays [ATR] vowel harmony that interacts with root-final consonants. This study provides evidence from five verb paradigms to show that the quality of a stem suffix, and its absence or presence, is determined by a combination of factors including [ATR], sonorancy, and prosody. Preliminary phonetic results show that, on average, root-final sonorants following [+ATR] vowels are longer than those following [−ATR] vowels. This differs from what is reported for other languages, as these consonants are neither inherently moraic, nor do they receive a mora due to their position alone. This finding suggests that, in Bondu So, [+ATR] licenses sonorant moraicity. We argue that these instances of coerced moraicity explain otherwise unexpected patterns of suffixation among these verb paradigms.