Mwani, freely picking and choosing from tone and stress?

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• Dr Maud Devos (Royal Museum for Central Africa, Belgium)
• Thursday 05 November 2015, 16:00-17:30
• GR06/07, English Faculty Building, 9 West Road, Sidgwick Site.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Theodora Alexopoulou.

! Mwani, a Mozambican Bantu language closely related to Swahili, has previously been described either as a tone (Floor 2000) or a pitch-accent language (Philippson 1993, 1992, 1989). Rather than trying to force one or the other type on Mwani, I aim, in line with Hyman 2009, to examine the properties of the Mwani tone system in order to better understand which interesting in-between-systems languages can come up with. Mwani pitch has a restricted lexical function in nominal morphology and a clear grammatical function in verbal morphology. Nouns can have one out of two tonal patterns (i.e., penultimate (PU) H and antepenultimate (APU) H). The minimal pair in (1) illustrates the PU and the APU pattern on otherwise identical nouns. (1) kipáma ‘fish (sp.)’ PU kipâma ‘wall’ APU Every inflection has one (or more depending on subject specifications or the presence or absence of an object prefix) out of five melodic stem tone patterns assigned to it: no H, ultimate (U) H, penultimate (PU) H, antepenultimate (APU) H and stem-initial (S1) as well as PU H (S1PU). In (2) an example of each pattern is given in combination with - zungunukira. (2) ni-zungunuk-ir-a ‘I (have) turned around towards’ no H sp1sg-turn.around-appl-pfv zungunuk-ir-á ‘turn around towards!’ U turn.around-appl-imp a-wa-zungunuk-ír-e ‘they have not turned around towards’ PU neg-sp2-turn.around-appl-pfv a-wa-zungunúk-ir-a ‘they do not turn around towards’ APU neg-sp2-turn.around-appl-prs ku-zúngúnuk-ír-a ‘to turn around towards’ S1PU np15-turn.around-appl-fv Whereas these functions are typical of tone systems of other Eastern Bantu languages (Odden & Bickmore 2014), the H tone positions are reminiscent of metrical systems. This is especially the case for the so-called APU pattern for which the position of the melodic H depends not only on the number of mora’s of the macro-stem but also on syllable weight. Other properties of the Mwani prosodic system including interfaces with syntax show how detailed descriptions of little known languages urge us to continuously fine-tune the typological systems we come up with. References Hyman, L.M. 2009. How not to do phonological typology: the case of pitch-accent. Language Sciences 31: 213-238. Odden, D. & L. Bickmore (eds). 2014. Melodic Tone in Bantu. Africana Linguistica 20. Philippson, G. 1989. Quelques données sur le mwani (Mozambique): Eléments de phonologie comparative et présentation du système verbal. In M.-F. Rombi (ed.), Le swahili et ses limites: ambiguïté des notions reçues, pp. 69-81. Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations. Philippson, G. 1992. Tons et accent dans les langues bantu d’Afrique Orientale. Etude comparative typologique et diachronique. CNRS : Thèse d’état. Philippson, G. 1993. Tone (and Stress) in Sabaki. In D. Nurse & T.J. Hinnebusch, Swahili and Sabaki: A linguistic history, pp. 248-265. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Floor, S. 2000. Mwani grammatical sketch. SIL Mozambique.

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