Vol. 27 No. 4 (2018): Nordic Journal of African Studies
Linguistics

OCP effects in Malawian CiTonga tone patterns

PDF
  • Lee Bickmore,
  • Winfred Mkochi
Lee Bickmore
University at Albany & The University of the Free State
Winfred Mkochi
University of Malawi
DOI: https://doi.org/10.53228/njas.v27i4.399

Published 2019-05-21

Keywords

  • tone,
  • Obligatory Contour Principle,
  • CiTonga,
  • Bantu

How to Cite

Bickmore, L., & Mkochi, W. (2019). OCP effects in Malawian CiTonga tone patterns. Nordic Journal of African Studies, 27(4), 23. https://doi.org/10.53228/njas.v27i4.399

Abstract

The Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) has been shown to both motivate certain tonological processes, as well as act as a constraint, blocking an otherwise productive process. In this paper, we describe and analyze the role of the OCP in Malawian CiTonga, an under-described Malawian Bantu language. We show that OCP violations involving High tones are sometimes repaired and sometimes not. When they are repaired, there is not a single repair strategy, but five possible ones, where the strategy employed depends on two crucial factors: 1) the morpho-syntactic domain containing the two High tones, and 2) whether the H autosegments in question are linked to a single TBU or multiple TBUs.

 

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

PDF