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Surface underspecification of tone in Chichewa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2002

Scott Myers
Scott Myers
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
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Abstract

In Chichewa, a Bantu language spoken mainly in Malawi, there is a contrast between high and low tone, as illustrated by such minimal pairs as mtengo ‘price’ vs. mténgo ‘tree’. But there is a strong asymmetry between the two tones in their phonological behaviour: high tone is phonologically active, while low tone is phonologically inert. Tone changes occur in Chichewa only if there is a high tone present in the phrase; a phrase composed only of low-toned morphemes is always realised unchanged with all low tones. The tonal phonology of the language can be described completely without reference to low tone (Kanerva 1989), as is typical for the Bantu languages (Stevick 1969).

I argue in this paper that this asymmetry is due to underspecification. The contrast in Chichewa is a privative one between high tone and no tone. Low tone is phonologically inert because it is simply the absence of tone. In particular, low tone is absent from surface representation. Syllables that are not specified as high-toned are assigned F0 by a non-linear transition function, as proposed for English intonation by Pierre-humbert (1980).

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonology , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , December 1998 , pp. 367 - 391
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The research reported here was supported by grant SBR-9514481 from the National Science Foundation. I would like to thank Sam Mchombo for helping to set up the experiment and for participating in it, Daniel and Chipo Jamu for providing Chichewa data, Troi Carleton for assisting and John Ohala for making available the recording facilities of the Phonology Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley. Thanks to Sung-a Kim and Graham Horwood for help with the pitch-tracking. I have benefited from useful comments from Megan Crowhurst, Björn Lindblom, John Kingston, John McCarthy, Elisabeth Selkirk and an associate editor and two reviewers for Phonology.