Outward-sensitive phonologically-conditioned suppletive allomorphy vs. first-last tone harmony in Cilungu (original) (raw)

Patterns of Tonal Allomorphy in the Citshwa Verb

Citshwa is an underdescribed member of the Tsonga language complex (Bantu) spoken in Mozambique. In the phonological literature, dialects of Tsonga are best known for their phrasal tonology, due to the pioneering work of Beuchat 1959, Cole-Beuchat 1961, 1962 and Kisseberth's (1994) reinterpretation of that work within an early "domains"-based approach, and the subsequent theoretical and descriptive work of Selkirk (2011), Selkirk and Lee (2015), and Lee and Selkirk (2022) within the "Match" theory of the interface between phonology and syntax. Citshwa has not been a part of this literature on phrasal tonology, and as it turns out, it differs in one significant respect from the previously studied dialects, perhaps challenging some of its conclusions. The focus of the present paper is not the phrasal phonology, though some of its major features will of necessity be mentioned as they will be apparent in the data discussed. Our focus, however, is the tonology of the Citshwa verb; specifically, how the verb in a number of tenses is pronounced, both when the verb is final in the utterance and also when it is followed by other words. The tonology of this array of verb tenses is complex and difficult to make sense of in terms of consistent underlying representations and general tonological rules. We argue that the tonal pattern of the verbal word requires recognizing a small number of interacting tonal allomorphs whose selection determined by the "tense" system of the verb, where a tense is a specific morphological array of subject marker, tense-aspect-mood markers, negative marker, and the "macrostem" (i.e., an optional object marker and an obligatory verb stem which consists of a root and one or more derivational and inflectional suffixes and an obligatory final vowel) that hosts them. We refer to the set of allomorphic choices that a given tense makes as its "allomorphic profile". Unfortunately, these profiles are unexpectedly diverse when the profiles are examined in all their details. For the larger study of the phrasal tonology, essentially all that matters is whether a verb ends in a High tone or not. Unfortunately, one cannot know whether it will end in a High tone without knowing its allomorphic profile. Thus ultimately, the study of even the phrasal tonology is connected to the internal workings of the verb. Before introducing the allomorphy and illustrating the patterns in detail, we will present some basic observations about the Citshwa tone system.

Lee Bickmore, ,Chilungu Phonology (2007) CSLI Publications, University of Chicago Press,Stanford

2009

Cilungu Phonology provides a comprehensive description of the intricate and diverse tone system of Cilungu, a Bantu language of Zambia classified as M14 in Guthrie's (1967Guthrie's ( -1971 Bantu classification. An asset of this work for which the author must be commended is that it provides a thorough and fully worked out tone system of a particular language in contrast to fragments of tonal systems abounding in the Bantu literature.

Tone assignment and grammatical tone in Anal (Tibeto-Burman)

Studies in Language, 2018

Complex phenomena of grammatical tone, well-described for many African languages, are increasingly attested also in the Tibeto-Burman family. This paper describes the tone assignment rule and two cases of tonal expression of grammatical categories in the Tibeto-Burman language Anal. The typologically unusual rule involves tone spreading, tonal polarity on a non-edge constituent and additional spreading, resulting in constant tonal patterns across grammatical suffixes. In two different cases the combination of the tonal pattern assigned by this rule with peculiar morpho-tonological processes results in a marking of a grammatical category (future and 1SG-person) by grammatical tone, by vowel-length, or only by the overall tonal pattern of the verbal form. Both cases are related to the omission of an explicit marking of the category, although the outcome cannot be explained only by the concept of a floating tone.

Verbal Tone in Buli: a Morphosyntactic Analysis

2004

In languages where tone or accent is lexically contrastive there is often an asymmetry in the lexical categories that display the contrast. Typically roots have a greater range of distinctions than affixes. Within roots nominals often make more distinctions than verbs. For example, in both Spanish and Italian nominals contrast the location of stress within the three-syllable window at the right edge of the word. Italian retains this contrast in verbal inflection (cf. m'acin-a 'grinds' vs. lav'or-a 'works') while it has been lost in Spanish. For pitch accent systems, Tokyo Japanese verbs lack the contrasts for accent location found in nouns while retaining the accented vs. unaccented lexical contrast. In the Fukuoka dialect (Smith 1999) verbs fall uniformly in the accented class (realized on the syllable containing the penultimate mora). Similar asymmetries are found in the Bantu languages. In many of these languages the absence of lexical contrasts in the verb is compensated by complex accentual and tonal alternations as a function of the tense/aspect of the verb. These cases are particularly challenging analytically because often the underlying morphological structure is not clear and hence there is no direct connection between accentual/tonal location and tense-aspect exponence.

Grammatical functions of tone in San Maka

Mandenkan 65. 2021. P. 333-348., 2021

The paper is an overview of the functions of tone in San Maka (Eastern Mande < Mande < Niger-Congo). In this language, tone has different grammatical functions in addition to distinguishing lexical meanings of words. The analysis of tone shows that its grammatical functions embrace different morpho-syntactic domains. Tonal oppositions are analyzed in the wide contexts of segmental morphology of the language. It is shown that tonal oppositions may distinguish paradigmatic word forms, which is primarily characteristic of a verb; tone is often the only distinctive feature that opposes neutral and perfective verbal forms. San Maka also displays verbal derivation by means of the tonal change. Tone oppositions are used in genitive constructions of the type N+N, where the tone of the second component rises. A special section is devoted to so-called floating tones. In San Maka, floating tones are allomorphs of segmental units: the 3sg pronoun à and the perfective predicative marker nə́, in certain contexts, are realized as tones.

The segmental and tonal structure of verb inflection in Babanki

In this study we provide a comprehensive phonological and morphological overview of the complex tense-aspect-mood (TAM) system of Babanki, a Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon. Our emphasis is on the competing inflectional tonal melodies that are assigned to the verb stem. These melodies are determined not only by the multiple past and future tenses, perfective vs. progressive aspect, and indicative vs. imperative, subjunctive, and conditional moods, but also affirmative vs. negative and "conjoint" (CJ) vs. "disjoint" (DJ) verbal marking, which we show to be more thoroughgoing than the better known cases in Eastern and Southern Bantu. The paper concludes with a ranking of the six assigned tonal melodies and fourteen appendices providing all of the relevant tonal paradigms.