This chapter presents field notes of the West Chadic language Ngizim, spoken in North-East Nigeria. In Ngizim, subject focus is indicated by subject inversion, whereas the word order of sentences with focused non-subjects can remain unchanged. The goal of the field work was to find out more about focus marking in Ngizim.

This is the 13th issue of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 632. It is the first part of a series of Linguistic Fieldnote issues which present data collected by members of different projects of the SFB during fieldwork on various languages or dialects spoken worldwide. This part of the Fieldnote Series is dedicated to data from African languages. It contains contributions by Mira Grubic (A5) on Ngizim, and Susanne Genzel & Frank Kügler (D5) on Akan. The papers allow insights into various aspects of the elicitation of formal correlates of focus and related phenomena in different African languages investigated by the SFB in the second funding phase, especially in the period between 2007 and 2010.

This thesis studies the interactions of vowel tone with consonantal voice. Briefly, tone-voice interactions refer to: (i) voiced--not voiceless--onsets block high tone spreading; (ii) voiceless--not voiced--onsets block low tone spreading; (iii) sonorant onsets are transparent to both tonal processes. There are many variations to these archetypical patterns of tone-voice interactions. I argue that these variations as well as the archetypical patterns can receive a revealing account from the phonological theory. Specifically, this thesis explores the Prosodic Hypothesis of Tone-Voice, which claims: (i) tone must be represented prosodically (namely, tone is associated to mora); and (ii) tone-voice relations must be expressed by conditions (namely, path conditions, proposed in Archangeli and Pulleyblank (in prep)). By exploiting tonal representations and conditions on tone-voice, the Prosodic Hypothesis provides a principled account of tone-voice in Ngizim, Ewe, and Nupe. The result is a principled theory that unifies the known phonetic and phonological facts about tone-voice and that makes testable predictions about the nature and type of expected tone-voice interactions. In addition to tone-voice, this thesis investigates a range of theoretical issues from tonal representations, to onset representations, to the privative voicing theory to Grounded Phonology (Archangeli and Pulleyblank in prep.). I demonstrate that detailed formal analyses of tone-voice can not only uncover facts about tone-voice, but can also make important contributions to phonological theory.