Disentangling Conjoint, Disjoint, Metatony, Tone Cases, Augments, Prosody, and Focus in Bantu

Abstract

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2013) Disentangling Conjoint, Disjoint, Metatony, Tone Cases, Augments, Prosody, and Focus in Bantu Larry M. Hyman University of California, Berkeley Presented at the Workshop on Prosodic Constituents in Bantu languages: Metatony and Dislocations Universite de Paris 3, June 28-29, 2012 Introduction The purpose of this paper is to disentangle a number of overlapping concepts that have been invoked in Bantu studies to characterize the relation between a verb and what follows it. Starting with the conjoint/disjoint distinction, I will then consider its potential relation to “metatony”, “tone cases”, “augments”, prosody, and focus in Bantu. Conjoint/disjoint (CJ/DJ) 1 In many Bantu languages TAM and negative paradigms have been shown to exhibit suppletive allomorphy, as in the following oft-cited Chibemba sentences, which illustrate a prefixal difference in marking present tense, corresponding with differences in focus (Sharman 1956: 30): a. disjoint -la- b. conjoint -O- c. disjoint -la- bus& e mu-la-peep-a ee tu-peep-a sekeleeti bamo ba-la-ly-a insoka ‘do you (pl.) smoke’? ‘yes, we smoke cigarettes’ ‘some people actually eat snakes’ In (1a) the verb is final in its main clause and must therefore occur in the disjoint form, marked by the prefix -la-. In (1b), the answer to the question in (1a), the verb occurs in the conjoint form, which lacks the -la- prefix, since the verb is presupposed and ‘cigarettes’ is in focus. A table of Chibemba conjoint/disjoint forms is provided from Hyman & Watters (1948: 251) in (2) from Hyman & Watters (1984: 251), drawing on Sharman & Meeussen (1955), Sharman 1956 and Givon (1972): Present/hab. Past 1 /Fut 1 Past 2 Past 3 Past 4 PresLinger PastLinger Future 2 non-progressive conjoint disjoint -a -la- -a- -a -aa- -a (complex) -aci- -a -ile -alii- -a -a- -ile -ali- -ile -ile naa-´ -a -a- -ali -a ( -ka- -a -ka- -a ) progressive [±TS] [±TS] [±TS] [+TS] [-TS] [+TS] [+TS] -lee- -a [±TS] -acilaa- -alee- -alee- [±TS] [±TS] [±TS] -kalee- [±TS] In the above table, the feature [TS] stands for “tone spreading”: Verb forms which are [+TS] spread their last underlying H tone to the end of the word (Sharman & Meeussen 1955: 395). All conjoint forms are [-TS]. The two sentences in (3) show the [±TS] of the P 1 correlating with the CJ/DJ distinction (Sharman Several months after presenting this paper, I received two papers (Creissels 2012, van der Wal 2013) which cover much more on the conjoint-disjoint distinction and overlaps with some of the discussion of further sections below. Following them, I will adopt the practice of referring to conjoint and disjoint as CJ and DJ. Thanks to Jenneke van der Val for comments on an earlier version of this paper.