Francis X. Katamba

Luganda and the strict layer hypothesis

The ability of a languages syntax to determine the application vs. non-application of postlexical phonological rules has by now been firmly established in a number of languages. Such rules, which apply above the word level, have come especially from the prosodic aspects of phonological structure, e.g. effects of syllabification, stress-accent, duration and tone. Much of the interest in this syntax-phonology interaction has centred around two general questions: (i) which specific properties of the syntax are available to affect the application of phonological rules?; (ii) how should these syntactic properties be incorporated into the phonology? While the answer to the first question logically ranges from one extreme (all syntax) to the other (no syntax), the correct answer most certainly lies somewhere in between. The (ir)relevance of X-bar theory, c-command, traces and labelled brackets has been argued from a number of languages (see especially Selkirk I984, I986; Kaisse I985; Nespor & Vogel i986; Chen this volume; and the references cited in these works). Whatever constraints there may be on the syntactic content that is phonologically relevant, one must still address the second question concerning the form in which the syntax is presented. Two logical positions are available, both of which have been taken. The most straightforward approach would be to say that syntactic conditions are incorporated directly into the phonological rule(s) in question. For a phonological rule to apply to the sequence A#B, it may be necessary to add to the phonological structural description of the rule the requirement that A and B belong to the same xmax (and perhaps also that B must c-command A within this xmax). We shall refer to this view as the DIRECT SYNTAX

Spurious high-tone extensions in Luganda

A handful of mostly older descriptions of Bantu tone systems note an unexpected H tone effect on verb stems containing a causative -j- or passive -u- extension. Meeussen cites these effects as archaic and reconstructs H tone on these vocalic suffixes in Proto-Bantu. It has been difficult to evaluate this historical claim, since not all Bantu tone systems exhibit what we are calling ‘spurious H-tone extensions’, and still fewer of these have been described in detail. In this article we present a reasonably complete description of spurious H-tone effects in Luganda, demonstrating that spurious H can (and must) appear only when these extensions occur on a ‘modified base’ (<PB *-jd-e) verb form in an inflectional frame that independently requires a H tone suffix. We suggest that the unexpected additional H tone is not underlyingly on the vocalic suffixes, but rather has the status of an enclitic in synchronic Luganda. We hypothesize that spurious H is a relic of an earlier stage of Bantu when the verb stem ha...

A nonlinear analysis of vowel harmony in Luganda

In some languages, vowels occurring in some specified domain, which is usually the word, must share some phonetic property or properties. Such languages are said to have vowel harmony. Luganda, a Bantu language of Uganda, is unusual in having a vowel harmony system which is entirely morphologically conditioned. There is one subsystem which operates in the noun phrase and another irregular subsystem which operates in the verb phrase. The aim of this paper is to show how the non-linear theory of phonology developed by writers like Clements (I980, I982) can throw some light on this apparently irregularity-ridden system.

Phonetically Motivated Word Formation

Sound structure plays an important role in word formation. Languages often impose strict phonotactic restrictions on the combination of sounds, with certain phonetic features in syllables occurring in certain positions in a word. For instance, whereas an English word with CC following a long vowel (e.g., fiend) is allowed if the second consonant is coronal, it is not allowed if the second consonant is noncoronal (e.g., *fiemp). Allomorphy also avoids violation of phonotactic constraints. Affixation that creates deviant phonological words is prohibited. Furthermore, phonological factors regulate many complex reduplicative and root pattern morphological processes and compounding can also be phonetically driven.