1 LOW TONE RAISING IN BOLE

Bole has a tonal process, referred to as Low Tone Raising (LTR) in this paper, first described by Lukas (1969) with additional information added by Gimba (1998), whereby a high tone spreads from the final syllable of a word and replaces a low tone on the initial syllable of a following word. LTR is blocked if the L-bearing syllable begins in a voiced obstruent. LTR is licensed only in certain syntactic environments, notably N+N genitives, V+nominal direct object, and clitic+host. It is blocked from applying in certain other environments, including Noun plus any post-nominal modifier. In addition to these syntactic conditions on LTR, certain word classes never undergo and/or never condition LTR, even where the phonological and syntactic conditions are met. Most notable among these word classes are proper names. The paper proposes that the syntactic requirement for LTR is that it apply only between items that, together, form the head of a phrase, and it proposes an intermediate level of structure (called “little xp”) that forms a phrasal head. In some cases, syntactic structure must be adjusted to allow for LTR, esp. in the case of mono-moraic clitics plus their hosts. It is suggested that proper names, which neither undergo nor condition LTR, are tonal “islands”