Melodic Tone in Bantu: Overview Dave Odden (Ohio State University)

A fundamental notion of many suprasegmental theories such as Autosegmental Phonology is that of a “tone melody”, the idea that the tones on a word may be abstracted away from the phonemes that they are realized on. This allows the identification of a small number of tone patterns like H, L, HL, LH and LHL found in Mende nouns (Leben 1973, Goldsmith 1976). Such an analysis also ex-plains patterns of verb inflection in Tiv, where verb tense-aspect is signalled by modifications of root tone whereby L roots have allomorphs like [ngòhòrò, ngòhórò, ngòhóró] ‘accept’, and H roots have the variants [yévèsè, yévésè, yévésé] ‘flee ’ – stems may add L, HL or H, depending on inflectional form. This situation, where alternation in stem tone plays a central role in verb in-flection, is quite widespread in Bantu, and is the focus of this volume. Indeed, to the best of our knowledge, such patterns are universal in those Bantu languages with tone, and are missing only in a handful of languages such as Swahili or Nya-kyusa that have no tone. Despite being ubiquitous in Bantu, we believe that the nature of these systems as a whole is not well understood, even though some spe