Abstract
Abstract Ekegusii, a Bantu language spoken in southwestern Kenya, exhibits a wide range of stem tonal patters in the finite verbal system. Ekegusii exhibits the bounded spreading of prefixal and lexical High tones and the unbounded spreading of grammatical High tones. Yet each of these apply in certain tonal configurations and not others. Predicting just when a High exhibits bounded spread, unbounded spread, or neither will be the focus of this paper. I suggest that accounting for the lack of spread is quite difficult to do under standard generative assumptions on the application of phonological rules. Specifically, I conclude that to account for the attested verbal patterns it becomes necessary to either 1. 1) relax the principle of adjacency that holds between the trigger and target or 2. 2) allow the Obligatory Contour Principle to block the spread of certain (morphologically defined) High tones, but not others.
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