High tone bumping in Runyankore

Larry M. Hyman

doi:10.1515/jall-2022-8890

Article

High tone bumping in Runyankore

Larry M. Hyman

Published/Copyright: September 12, 2022

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From the journal Journal of African Languages and Linguistics Volume 43 Issue 1

Abstract

In this study I present the unusual properties of a rule of High Tone Bumping (HTB) which occurs in certain languages of the Rutara subgroup of Bantu. By this process, the final H tone of a word or clitic “bumps” a preceding H tone one syllable to the left, e.g. /kaawá=kí/ → kááwa=kí ‘what coffee?’ (as realized utterance-medially). The triggers consist of /H/ CV monosyllables as well as VCV words whose final syllable is /H/. Since these can interact with each other, frequently with V+V vowel coalescence, this produces H tone sequences of trigger-targets in which each H appears to be bumped one syllable to the left. I present the facts of HTB in some detail and offer two synchronic analyses, one involving a left-to-right iterative rule, the other recognizing H*-marked tone spans that can be globally accessed to apply HTB all at once. I conclude by considering possible historical origins of HTB.

Keywords: Bantu; iterative rule application; tone shift; tone spans

Corresponding author: Larry M. Hyman, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkely, USA, E-mail: hyman@berkeley.edu

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on materials collected with my primary consultant, Dr. Daphine Namara, a native speaker of the pastoralist group from Kamushoko Parish in Mbarara District of Uganda, originally in an undergraduate field methods course at UC Berkeley in Fall 2019 and probed further by the author over the following six months. I would especially like to thank Daphine (DN) for her dedication to this project, two other consultants, Gloria Tumushabe and James Arinaitwe, and the members of the field methods course, especially Nicholas Carrick, who wrote a short paper on the original HTB observation, applying optimality theory (Carrick 2019). I am also grateful to Will Leben for a very helpful Zoom discussion (5/28/20) and to Laura Downing, and to two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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Published Online: 2022-09-12

Published in Print: 2022-05-25

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/jall-2022-8890

Keywords for this article

Bantu; iterative rule application; tone shift; tone spans