Abstract
Kinyarwanda is a Bantu language with one phonemic (H) tone (Kimenyi 2002). This can phonetically realized as high, low, rising, and falling. This talk addresses the tonological discrepancy between declaratives and polar questions in Kinyarwanda. Kimenyi(1980) briefly addresses Kinyarwanda polar questions and describes them as “a rising pitch at the sentence final position”. This generalization captures crucially cannot predict polar questions in which there is no LHL contour at the end of the sentence. I argue that what polar questions share is (a) suspension of downstep on the rightmost lexical H and (b) deletion of all word-final prosodic H. Kinyarwanda forms a prosodic structure that takes the scope of the question. This expands on Richards (2010) analysis of wh-questions. Kinyarwanda marks the right edges of prosodic words using boundary tones, similar to Chichewa (Kanerva 1990; Myers 1996).
Highlights
IntroductionKinyarwanda is a Bantu language with one phonemic tone
One possible explanation for the suppression of lexical high tones that serve as the right edge of the prosodic domain of polar questions has to do with contrast
In this paper I have provided a detailed descriptive generalization of polar question formation in Kinyarwanda and shown that the rightmost lexical high tone is raised for utterances with at least one lexical high tone, and the penultimate syllable is raised for utterances with no lexical high tones
Summary
Kinyarwanda is a Bantu language with one phonemic tone This phonemic tone leads to a contrast that is realized as high and low, but but there is evidence that high tone is the only lexical tone (Kimenyi 2002). A high tone associated with the first mora of a long vowel surfaces as falling intonation, or HL. A high tone associated with the second mora of a long vowel surfaces as rising intonation, or LH. This allows three types of surface tones on long vowels: rising (LH), falling (HL), or a low, level intonation (LL).
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