Michael R Marlo

This paper presents an overview of the verbal tone system of Lower Nyole (LN), a moribund and previously unrecognized variety of Nyole (JE35) in southern Busoga. LN has a reversive tone system with two tonal classes of verbs – (i) verbs which are underlyingly toneless and (ii) historically *H-toned verbs which synchronically have an initial /L/ tone. All known verbal contexts of LN are inflected with a melodic tone pattern, i.e. there are no tonally uninflected constructions. Like other Luyia languages, LN has a large number of tonal inflections, characterized by assigning Hs to positions at the edges of the verb stem. An additional noteworthy property of LN verb tone is that long vowels that precede NC clusters are treated like short vowels by tone assignment principles.

This paper offers an overview of verbal tone melodies within Luyia, a cluster of Bantu languages spoken in Kenya and Uganda. Luyia tone is diverse, possessing three types of verbal tonal systems: ‘conservative’, ‘predictable’, and ‘reversive’. We illustrate the general tonal characteristics of each type of system with an exemplar language variety, describing the complex interactions of lexical and melodic tones.

In this talk, we present an overview of nominal and verbal tone patterns in Bukusu, a Bantu language of western Kenya. In Bukusu, tone distinguishes lexical items and is also a major feature of teh marking of grammatical distinctions such as tense. We discuss data from a variety of morphological and syntactic contexts and illustrate some of the ways in which components of grammar interact to produce complex surface tonal patterns.

This paper presents an overview of the tone system of Lower Nyole (LN), a moribund and previously unrecognized variety of Nyole (JE35) spoken in southern Busoga. After providing a preliminary study of tonal patterns in nouns, we show that LN has a 'reversive' tone system with two tonal classes of verbs – (i) verbs which are underlyingly toneless and (ii) historically *H-toned verbs which synchronically have an initial /L/ tone. All known verbal contexts of LN are inflected with a melodic tone pattern, i.e. there are no tonally uninflected constructions. Like other Luyia languages, LN has a large number of tonal inflections, which are characterized by the assignment of Hs to positions at the edges of the verb stem. An additional noteworthy property of LN verb tone is that long vowels that precede NC clusters are treated like short vowels by tone assignment principles.

Studies of Bantu noun tone are relatively few compared to those on verb tone. Even seminal research on the subject is arguably limited in scope, tending to focus on the behavior of mono- and disyllabic nouns and on the connection between synchronic tonal melodies and those reconstructed for Proto-Bantu cognates. This paper adds to a recent trend of looking beyond these few noun shapes to consider the how tone is manifested on a wider variety of Wanga nouns including those that are morphologically complex in various ways. Drawing on the tonal behavior of approximately 2,100 nouns in our amassed lexicon, we have identified eight major noun tone patterns.

We divide Wanga noun tone melodies into pairs (A/G, B/C, E/F, D/H) based on their surface characteristics. We illustrate, however, that nouns exhibiting one melody vs. the other in a given pair appear to have different origins. Some Wanga noun tone melodies have a direct mapping to those reconstructed for Proto-Bantu and mirror the diachronic behavior of certain other Lacustrine languages; Wanga Pattern A largely corresponds to Proto-Bantu *LL. Other melodies are innovative (such as Pattern H), while still others maintain prosodic characteristics of the language from which they were borrowed; Wanga has reinterpreted Swahili’s pattern of antepenultimate stress as HØ in its Pattern F nouns. We show further evidence for sub-patterns within some melodies that have emerged due to interactions between a noun’s lexical tonal melody and other tones contributed either by the augment (pre-prefix) or, in some instances, other prefixes and even bases, in instances of reduplication.

Of particular interest to us are connections that Wanga’s nominal tonology reveal to the verb tone system, as described elsewhere. For example, both noun and verb tone provide strong yet oftentimes covert evidence for an underlying three-way tonal contrast between /H/, /L/, and /Ø/. The fact that these contrasts, particularly between /L/ and /Ø/ (as in Patterns A vs. G and Pattern E vs. F), are revealed only in certain phrasal contexts may have implications for the eventual leveling of these distinctions altogether. Also, like in the verb system, the presence of a L tone in a noun tone melody has the ability to block tonal alternations due Reverse Meeussen’s Rule (HH  ØH) which, in turn, has an influence on still other outcomes that we and others attributed to Prefix Hop. L tone can also block anticipatory H spreading when a noun appears phrase-medially, just as it does in Wanga verbs. These parallels are not absolute, however, as Wanga nouns witness unbounded rightward H spreading and Meeussen’s Rule (HH  HØ), both of which are absent in the verb system.