Ruth Raharimanantsoa - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
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Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique / French National Centre for Scientific Research
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Papers by Ruth Raharimanantsoa
Teke-Eboo is a Bantu B70 language spoken in Congo-Brazzaville, which displays complex tone melodi... more Teke-Eboo is a Bantu B70 language spoken in Congo-Brazzaville, which displays complex tone melodies combining grammatical tone, subject agreement tone and lexical tone on verbs. This study of tense marking in Eboo identifies the tones which mark the recent past, general past and future tenses, and shows how the underlying high-low (H-L) contrastive tone system adds both downstepped H and mid (M) tones in surface realisations. Grammatical tone is also impacted by an intonational boundary L tone (L%), which causes lowering of grammatical tones utterance finally. Much earlier analysis of the prosodic features of neighbouring Teke-Kukuya (Paulian 1975, Hyman 1987) provides a helpful reference point for this study. According to Paulian, Kukuya has a stem-initial stress accent, which affects the distribution of segments and tones, as well as five tone melodies which spread over stems and even onto prefixes on the following word. In this study of tense in Eboo, I show that there is also segmental evidence for a possible stress accent on the stem-initial syllable, and that the same tone melodies as in Kukuya operate across stems and beyond, providing the key to understanding how grammatical tone marks tense on Eboo verbs.
This paper describes aspects of the phonology of Eboo-Nzikou which forms part of the Teke languag... more This paper describes aspects of the phonology of Eboo-Nzikou which forms part of the Teke language group (Bantu B70) spoken in Congo-Brazzaville. It posits that Eboo and Nzikou are phonologically the same variety of Teke. Proto-Bantu reconstructions, as well as two previous phonological sketches of Eboo are taken as the basis for this study. Some of the findings of these sketches are re-interpreted in the light of further research and fieldwork carried out by myself and others. A revised consonant, vowel and syllable inventory is presented for EbooNzikou, with prenasalised consonants as sequences of nasal plus consonant. The number of vowel phonemes is increased to nine oral and seven nasalised vowels, compared to the previously proposed systems of five or seven oral vowels and five nasalised vowels. A mid-vowel split is shown to have occurred, with [e] and [o] functioning as phonemes in the verb system, as a result of advanced tongue root harmony, consonant loss and final vowel del...
Teke-Eboo is a Bantu B70 language spoken in Congo-Brazzaville, which displays complex tone melodi... more Teke-Eboo is a Bantu B70 language spoken in Congo-Brazzaville, which displays complex tone melodies combining grammatical tone, subject agreement tone and lexical tone on verbs. This study of tense marking in Eboo identifies the tones which mark the recent past, general past and future tenses, and shows how the underlying high-low (H-L) contrastive tone system adds both downstepped H and mid (M) tones in surface realisations. Grammatical tone is also impacted by an intonational boundary L tone (L%), which causes lowering of grammatical tones utterance finally. Much earlier analysis of the prosodic features of neighbouring Teke-Kukuya (Paulian 1975, Hyman 1987) provides a helpful reference point for this study. According to Paulian, Kukuya has a stem-initial stress accent, which affects the distribution of segments and tones, as well as five tone melodies which spread over stems and even onto prefixes on the following word. In this study of tense in Eboo, I show that there is also segmental evidence for a possible stress accent on the stem-initial syllable, and that the same tone melodies as in Kukuya operate across stems and beyond, providing the key to understanding how grammatical tone marks tense on Eboo verbs.
This paper describes aspects of the phonology of Eboo-Nzikou which forms part of the Teke languag... more This paper describes aspects of the phonology of Eboo-Nzikou which forms part of the Teke language group (Bantu B70) spoken in Congo-Brazzaville. It posits that Eboo and Nzikou are phonologically the same variety of Teke. Proto-Bantu reconstructions, as well as two previous phonological sketches of Eboo are taken as the basis for this study. Some of the findings of these sketches are re-interpreted in the light of further research and fieldwork carried out by myself and others. A revised consonant, vowel and syllable inventory is presented for EbooNzikou, with prenasalised consonants as sequences of nasal plus consonant. The number of vowel phonemes is increased to nine oral and seven nasalised vowels, compared to the previously proposed systems of five or seven oral vowels and five nasalised vowels. A mid-vowel split is shown to have occurred, with [e] and [o] functioning as phonemes in the verb system, as a result of advanced tongue root harmony, consonant loss and final vowel del...