Laura McPherson

Laura McPherson is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Dartmouth College. Her research is driven by primary fieldwork and in-depth description of tonal languages, primarily in West Africa. She has written two reference grammars of African languages, A Grammar of Tommo So (2013) and A Grammar of Seenku (2020). From a theoretical perspective, her work focuses on diverse aspects of tone, including its phonetics, its phonological representation, its interfaces with morphology and syntax. She is currently conducting a cross-linguistic study of musical surrogate languages to document these endangered traditions and analyze their phonetic and phonological underpinnings.