Grammaticalization in Somali and the development of morphological tone

Nina Hagen Kaldhol,Sverre Stausland Johnsen

doi:10.3765/plsa.v6i1.4993

Abstract

We demonstrate how grammaticalization may cause the restructuring of prosodic systems, leading to the development of new prosodic types. Illustrated with data from Northern Somali and related varieties, we show how a restricted tone system has developed into one of morphological tone through grammaticalization of independent words to bound forms. Diachronic change has weakened the “accentual” properties of the High tone in Somali, and the tone patterns are synchronically best analyzed as properties of morphological constructions rather than of prosodic domains.

Highlights

One of the puzzles in Somali that has been the topic of debate involves data of the type illustrated in table 1, in which different constructions involve different types of tone patterns
The goal of the present paper is to demonstrate that while the distribution of the High tone in Somali used to be restricted within a word domain at a previous stage of the language, grammaticalization has weakened these restrictions, causing a new system to develop: the synchronic system is one of morphological tone in which the tone patterns are associated with different morphological constructions
We argue that the univerbation of the periphrastic progressive forms to synthetic ones has blurred the relationship between tones and words, and this way, grammaticalization has restructured the prosodic system

Summary

Introduction

One of the puzzles in Somali that has been the topic of debate involves data of the type illustrated in table 1, in which different constructions involve different types of tone patterns. We argue that the distribution of the High tone in Somali is readily accounted for by grammaticalization: what looks like “exceptions” to culminativity and demarcativity are the result of a gradual increase in boundness, which has caused function words to become ‘glued’ to content words, weakening the accentual properties of the High tone. The periphrastic future construction, illustrated in table 4 (overleaf), is formed by combining the infinitive form of the lexical verb (e.g. keéni) with the general present form of the auxiliary verb doon, which otherwise means ‘want’, but here can be translated to ‘will’ (e.g. keéni doonaa, keéni doonó).

Positive Negative Positive Negative

Negative cúnayó cúnaysó cúnayó cúnaysó cúnaynó cúnaysáan cúnayáan