Attachment height and prosodic phrasing in Rutooro
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Attachment height and prosodic phrasing in Rutooro Lauren Clemens1 · Lee Bickmore1,2
Received: 24 April 2019 / Accepted: 18 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Rutooro is a Bantu language of Uganda that lacks lexical tone. Instead, prominence in Rutooro is marked with a High tone (H) on the penultimate syllable of the phonological phrase (ϕ-phrase). Like many languages in the family, syntactic XPs reliably correspond to ϕ-phrases; however, we find a previously unattested pattern in the prosody of Rutooro adnominal phrases. Head nouns are marked H when they combine with strong determiners and full relative clauses (RCs). In contrast, nouns do not bear an H tone when they combine with weak determiners, adjectives, and reduced RCs. We propose that the distribution of H tones serves as a diagnostic for whether an adnominal is generated in a DP-internal or external position. Reduced object RCs with overt subjects are a special case: the relativized head bears an unexpected H tone, while the subject is all-Low despite the fact that it is a self-contained XP. Also in the realm of reduced RCs, when a relativized head is separated from the RC by an additional modifier, e.g. an adjective, that modifier is realized as all-Low even though it is phrasal. We hypothesize that the attested, nonisomorphic phrasing arose to prevent i) ambiguity and ii) prosodic indeterminacy—when prosodic structure could be the output of more than one syntactic configuration—and was subsequently grammaticalized. Keywords Prosody · Bantu · Syntax · Phonology
B L. Clemens
[email protected]
1
University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany NY, USA
2
University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa
L. Clemens, L. Bickmore
1 Introduction Rutooro (E/J.12), a Ugandan Bantu language, is one of only a handful of Bantu languages in which tone is no longer lexically contrastive.1 Although Rutooro does not have contrastive tone, all words in isolation are pronounced with a prominence on the penultimate syllable, which we refer to as High (H) tone.2 In our examples, H tones are indicated with a diacritic above the nucleus of prominent syllables, as in (1). (1)
a.
b.
a-ka-tuungúro AUG -C12-onion ‘onion’3 mpóra slowly ‘slowly’
The distribution of H tones is nontrivial in phrasal contexts, where it is neither the case that each word has a H on the penultimate syllable, nor that every utterance is restricted to a single H on the final penult. This puzzle was first noted by Kaji (2009), who discussed phrasal minimal pairs, like the one in (2) (Kaji 2009: 242). In this case, the placement of a single H tone distinguishes between a possessed nominal and a copular clause. (2)
a.
b.
ky-áánge e-ki-tabu AUG -C7-book C7-1 SG ‘my book’ ky-áánge. E-ki-tábu AUG -C7-book C7-1 SG ‘The book is mine.’
When larger sentences are examined, it is possible to find nearly any combination of toneless words and H-marked words, but the utterance-final penult will always be marked with a H tone. (3)
a.
kw-eend-a ba-taandik-e ku-som’
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