Volume 32, Issue 1

This paper claims that relative clauses in Hausa originate from adverbial scene setting clauses. The scene setting clauses (SSCs) are causal, reason, or circumstantial clauses that evoke known, presupposed information and serve as background to their main clauses. When positioned after a sentence topic, they can shift formally and functionally from clause level to NP level modification and give rise to relative clauses in appropriate contexts. Taking advantage of Role and Reference Grammar's proposed functional and structural similarities between NP and clause modifiers, this paper also gives a representation for various relative constructions in Hausa.

While a lot has been said about H tone lowering after a L tone in Bafut, L tone raising before a non-L tone remains a less studied phenomenon. This paper seeks to describe these two tone phenomena in the language, which result from two phonologically contrastive pitch levels. Our findings are that in addition to the better known H tone lowering, there also exists L tone raising and the apparent complexity of the two phenomena is best understood in terms of the involvement of the interaction of tone features. We argue that the data are best analysed within a theory that recognises a register tier (Snider, The geometry and features of tone, Summer Institute of Linguistics and University of Texas at Arlington, 1999).

Earlier studies of Chichewa phrasal prosody – Kanerva (Focus and phrasing in Chichewa phonology, Garland, 1990) and Truckenbrodt (Phonological phrases: Their relation to syntax, focus and prominence, MIT, 1995, Linguistic Inquiry 30: 219–255, 1999, Linguistische Berichte 203: 273–296, 2005) – claim that Phonological Phrases in this language can potentially be quite large, as an entire maximal syntactic constituent – for example, a verb and all its complements – is parsed into a single Phonological Phrase in their analysis. This proposal predicts that even long and internally complex syntactic constituents will be parsed into a single Phonological Phrase. Relative clause constructions provide the ideal context for testing the proposal. However, neither Kanerva's (Focus and phrasing in Chichewa phonology, Garland, 1990) study of Chichewa prosodic phrasing nor Watkins's (A grammar of Chichewa: A Bantu language of British Central Africa, University of Chicago, 1937) and Mchombo's (The syntax of Chichewa, Cambridge University Press, 2004) grammars include sufficient examples to get a complete picture of their prosodic properties. Our study first presents a survey of prosodic phrasing in four relative clause constructions, then it provides an optimality theory (OT) analysis of the data. We show that Truckenbrodt's (Phonological phrases: Their relation to syntax, focus and prominence, MIT, 1995) OT analysis must be revised to account for the correlation we find in this data between syntactic phase edges and prosodic phrasing. Following work like Chen (Phonology Yearbook 4: 109–149, 1987), we show that the complement/adjunct distinction is an additional factor conditioning prosodic phrasing.

Aspects of the grammar of proper names in the Gabonese Bantu language Orungu are described and tentatively explained, with special attention for agreement and definiteness marking. Proper names have a mixed agreement pattern that differs from that of the common nouns with which they are related. Definiteness marking is redundant on proper names, which are inherently definite. The difference between definite and non-definite tone patterns is deployed to express other semantic-pragmatic values. Although the main focus is on personal names and place names, we pay attention to different types of names, including autonyms and names for numbers and languages. A noteworthy conclusion is that in order to arrive at a satisfying description, we need to define a new grammatical category, viz. that of deproprial nouns.