The Autosegmental Approach to Tone in Lusoga
The Autosegmental Approach to Tone in Lusoga
One of the major contributions of John Goldsmith’s autosegmental approach to tone was its application to Bantu. A new way was opened up to account for the often opaque relationship between underlying vs. surface H(igh) and L(ow) tonal representations. Goldsmith’s intuition was that H and L tones in Bantu do not behave in an equipollent way as they do in many West African and other tone systems, instead have an accentual character requiring a more syntagmatic and privative, accentual interpretation. In this paper I address Goldsmith’s accent-to-tone approach, which I apply to Lusoga, a Bantu language closely related to Luganda, whose tone system has not been previously well studied. The goal of this paper is thus threefold: I will (i) document the tonal system of Lusoga; (ii) demonstrate that it is both synchronically and diachronically intermediate between Luganda and Lulamogi; and (iii) argue that John Goldsmith’s autosegmental phonology still provides the best tools to the express the basic insights as to what is going on in these close, but different Bantu tone systems.
Keywords: tone, Lusoga, morphophonology, phonological change, opacity
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