The Interaction of Lexical and Grammatical Tone in the Bulu Verb System
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Date
2014-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
This thesis, based on original fieldwork, describes processes of tonal interaction between verbs and direct objects in Bulu, a Bantu language of Cameroon. It is principally concerned with two processes which can affect the tones of object nouns when they occur immediately after the verb. The first is a process of tonal agreement, in which the initial tone of the object changes to match the level of the final tone of the verb stem. The second is a process by which the object noun is assigned a high tone on the initial syllable.
The current work serves to offer a more complete description of these processes in Bulu than that which was noted by previous researchers, such as Yukawa (1992). It notes that patterns of tonal agreement can be triggered by both high and low-toned verb stems. Additionally, subsequent tones in the object noun can be affected if either tonal agreement or initial high tone assignment deletes an initial low that is the only low tone in the word.
This thesis also offers a description of environments which can trigger or block these tonal interactions. Each of these patterns is conditioned by particular TAM morphemes, and an account of this based on morphological conditioning and floating high tones is proposed. Prosodic conditioning of these patterns is also proposed based on phrase structure, with both agreement and high tone assignment patterns blocked by intervening phonological phrase boundaries.
Furthermore, an analysis of these two tonal processes is offered using both autosegmental representations (Goldsmith 1976) to demonstrate the proposed tonal structure of these words as well as constraints within an Optimality Theory framework (Prince and Smolensky 1993) to provide an account of the phonological grammar responsible for these patterns. It is demonstrated that a single unified analysis can account for these two distinct patterns, and this analysis is used to argue for an elevated status of low tones within the grammar of Bulu. This importance of low tones suggests that Bulu can be classified as displaying an underlying contrast between high and low tones, rather than the contrast between high and toneless that has been posited for many other Bantu languages.
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Keywords
Optimality Theory, Bantu, autosegmental phonology, tonal phonology