1Tutrugbu is one of a group of fifteen languages known as the Ghana-Togo Mountain (GTM) languages, situated in the Akuapem-Togo-Atakora hills running from south-eastern Ghana across Togo and into Benin. Most GTM language communities are fairly small by African standards, with Tutrugbu being spoken by a resident population of just over 2,000, with a similar number living outside the community. The GTM languages remained largely undescribed until a 10-year documentation project lead by Felix Ameka, as well as other efforts led to book-length monographs of Tuwuli (Harley 2005), Logba (Dorvlo 2008), Tafi (Bobuafor 2013), Sɛlɛɛ (Agbetsoamedo 2014), Avatime (van Putten 2014; Defina 2016) as well as the book under review. The precise classification of this diverse group is still a matter of current debate (Ameka & Essegbey 2017).
2Essegbey collected much of the data for his book during three fieldtrips to Ghana between 2003 and 2018. The rich variety of spontaneous data gathered includes greetings, discussions about burials and chieftaincy issues, and monologues on female initiation rites, spinning yarn, and the pouring of libation. This is supplemented with elicited data collected using a range of documentary techniques involving picture series and video clips specially designed for investigating certain syntactic and semantic topics. Many of the recordings are available online at The Language Archive and the Endangered Languages Archive. The book follows a descriptive, largely form-to-function approach, along the lines of Dixon’s basic linguistic theory (Dixon 2010). It comprises ten chapters, covering a general introduction, phonology, morphology, noun and verb phrases, locative constructions, simple and complex clauses, sentence types, information structure and a final chapter containing some culturally significant texts. This last chapter is presumably the basis on which the words “and culture” were included in the title, as most of the other chapters are primarily linguistic in content. Readers hoping for detailed information about various ethnographic characteristics or cultural identity markers will be disappointed.
3Evaluation: The book is well structured and easy to read, with plenty of examples and five fully glossed texts, covering topics that many other grammars leave out (e.g. greetings). One of the most insightful aspects of the book is that, with Essegbey being a speaker of Ewe, the main L2 of the Batrugbu community, he is able to point out the numerous Ewe loanwords and calques in Tutrugbu, thereby highlighting the extent of contact-induced borrowing that has taken place. The extent of borrowing from Akan is less well noted, although dozens of words in his examples likely have their origin there, e.g. tumpá ‘bottle’, okotokú ‘sack’, εmpá ‘bed’, ɔkɔkɔ́ ‘fowl’, okutú ‘orange’, atadéέ ‘clothing’, tũtũtũ ‘black’, and some phrases or words which are claimed to have been borrowed from Ewe could easily have been borrowed from Akan instead, e.g. ɔhĩã ‘poverty’.
4Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to the people and their language and includes an impressively detailed socio-linguistic profile of each of the nine Batrugbu towns in terms of population, age, gender, and trade. It is unclear why a tenth town (Akorfanfaname) is shown on the map (Figure 2, p. 3), but not mentioned in the text. The chapter also includes some helpful statistics about multilingualism in the Tutrugbu community, which show that most people speak at least three languages: Tutrugbu, Ewe, Akan and/ or English.
5Chapter 2, the most problematic chapter in my opinion, gives a sketch of the phonology, including consonants and vowels, syllable structure, phonological processes, and tone. Notable is the presence of an aspirated voiced bilabial plosive, realised as a breathy voice quality on the following vowel. Given its typological rarity, it makes one wonder how common this phoneme is in the language, what it corresponds to in related languages, and how it may have arisen. The chapter includes a table showing 46 phonetic consonants but lacks a table of phonemes to illustrate the phoneme/allophone distinction and reveal the regularity of the system. The analysis of labialised consonants is also unclear, with different sets of labialised consonants shown in Table 6 (p. 16) and 7 (p. 21), along with the general statement that “while labialisation is phonemic for some [consonants], it is not for others” (p. 21). There is an extended discussion of ATR and labial harmony, although the explanation for the exceptions is unconvincing, leading one to suspect that there is more to the problem than meets the eye. Similarly, in the discussion of the contraction of V#C(V)- sequences, it is unclear when the final vowel, the initial consonant or the whole CV-prefix gets deleted, and there are several conflicting examples, e.g. /nɔ́ ka-mpɛ/ → [ni ampɛ] (ex. 57a, p. 47) versus /nɔ́ ka-bha/ → [n’abha] (ex. 26b, p. 205).
6Lexically, Essegbey analyses Tutrugbu as having three level and two contour tones, as well as a marginal extra-high tone in a couple of underived words. Grammatically, tonal contrasts are exploited for various distinctions in the TAM system. Evidence of tonal contrast is very weak and is certainly not helped by the inexplicable lack of full tone-marking in the relevant examples, even on some reported minimal pairs, e.g. Figures 12A and 12B, p. 57. Only high tones appear to be marked in most of the examples, but no explanation is given and there are numerous inconsistencies, which make cross-checking examples to verify the analysis very difficult. Furthermore, lexical tones are distinguished on the basis of absolute frequency rather than relative frequency, as if assuming (incorrectly) that all speakers produce the same tones within the same precise frequency range. In any case, the application of the distinction is inconsistent, e.g. butsi ‘broth’ in Figure 14A, p. 59, is described as having high tone but is pronounced at the same frequency as kivũ ‘day removed’ in Figure 15A, p. 60, which is described as having mid tone. As a minimum, what is needed is a list of all the different tone patterns that occur on nouns and verbs with different numbers of syllables, with full tonal transcriptions. The chapter concludes with barely half a page on tone-changing processes, although there is surely much more going on in this respect, some of which would likely be relevant to the grammar.
7Chapters 3 and 4 on nominal morphology and the noun phrase are much stronger analytically. Nine noun classes are identified on the basis of their agreement properties, although it is unclear why only certain types of agreement targets are listed in Table 21 (p. 94), whilst other targets, e.g. numerals, demonstratives, relativisers and object pronouns, are described in later chapters. The analysis would also have benefitted from distinguishing between nominal form, morphological class, agreement class and gender, along the lines outlined in Güldemann & Fiedler (2019) and exemplified for Ɓə́ná-Yungur by Van de Velde & Idiatov (2017). Essegbey draws attention to the fact that noun and agreement prefixes are often omitted or generalised in natural speech, not just by the younger generation, suggesting that the noun class system is being eroded. The kV- prefix sometimes has an uncertain antecedent, which makes one wonder whether it functions as a pleonastic pronoun, as it does in the related language Tuwuli (Harley 2005: 183). In discussing the determiners, the notions of discourse referentiality (Givón 1979; Du Bois 1980: 208) or “relevance of referent identification” (Comrie 1989: 136) might have proved useful. The definite determiner nɔ́ (along with its cliticised variants ɛ and ɔ) is noted as being identical to the frame topic marker (as it is in many Kwa languages), a connection which warrants further discussion. Possibly what might link the two is the idea that the speaker is indicating that the hearer should be able to identify the contextual relevance of the immediately preceding expression. The function of the specific determiner tVlí could then be described as indicating that the noun it marks has contextual relevance mainly for the subsequent, rather than the preceding discourse context.
8In Chapter 5 on the verb phrase, Essegbey analyses Tutrugbu has having the following segmental TAM distinctions: future (which despite its label is not considered a tense as it also expresses probabilities and procedures), present progressive, past progressive, habitual, repetitive, factative, perfect, jussive, subjunctive, continuative, excessive, and a persistive (‘not yet’) aspect, as well as various operator verbs (e.g. bhoso ‘do first’), and directionals. Some of these categories are questionable. For example, the present progressive appears to be more of a general imperfective, as it also frequently has habitual and possibly also generic functions, see ex. 51a, p. 130. One thus wonders how the habitual function of the progressive contrasts with the function of the habitual aspect marker. The factative looks very much like a canonical perfective, as the description of its function is not borne out in some examples in which the action denoted by the verb is yet to take place, e.g. ɔ-mɔ in ex. 14, p. 226, έ-shɛ̃ in ex. 60b, p. 252, bɔ-vɛ in ex. 67a, p. 256. The absence of full tone marking certainly does not help here, as grammatical tone plays a part in several TAM distinctions. Some TAM morphemes are glossed inconsistently, e.g. tέ glossed as perf in ex. 46, p. 169, and as pfv in ex. 24, p. 230, and some claims of differences in meaning are not illustrated, e.g. vlέ- cont and á- prog, or wúlí rep and zɛ- rep. Overall, the author has made a solid attempt at unravelling the various verbal distinctions, although it doesn’t feel as though enough supporting evidence is presented.
9Chapters 6-8 are much more rigorous in their analysis and well-supported with examples. A whole chapter is dedicated to locative verbs and constructions, and eight different functions of serial verb constructions are described and illustrated. Chapter 9 on information structure is a little less convincing in places, especially in the functional and structural distinctiveness of the frame-topic marker nɔ́, the interrogative topic marker xɔ̃ and the contrastive topic marker xɔ̃nɔ̃́ (earlier described as a focus marker on p. 115, and as an intensifier on p. 139), which seems to be a combination of both xɔ̃ and nɔ́. The final chapter gives five culturally significant texts totalling about 40 pages.
10One slight hindrance to the overall reading pleasure of this book is that there is no list of abbreviations, although most of them are either standard or fairly simple to guess as one progresses through the book. There are also a significant number of typos or other errors in the text, e.g. Odumase and Kume (Table 1) versus Odumasi and Okume (Tables 2-4), [ʝʷ] instead of [ʒʷ] in Table 7, /a/ and /e/ occur in both the +ATR and -ATR columns in Table 11, and kasala vs. kasalã ‘tortoise’ on p. 81. These minor issues aside, this book is a valuable resource for anyone working on West African languages, and the discussion of the semantic distinctions between the various locative verbs and postpositions stands out as particularly helpful from a typological perspective, as does the nature and extent of the influence of a more widely spoken L2 (Ewe) on a lesser spoken L1 (Tutrugbu) in both the lexicon and the grammar. The book certainly provides a highly informative description of a little studied language, testifying to the linguistic diversity of GTM languages, and readers will hopefully be inspired to undertake further work on this still rather mysterious group, whose genetic unity and affiliation is yet to be firmly established.