Prosodic phonology in Bamana (Bambara): Syllable complexity, metrical structure, and tone

Abstract

or phrasal concepts do not behave tonally like other words. While such words are not tonally compact, they are subject to affaissement in a manner similar to the causative suffixes above. 7.2.5 Tonal compactness The presentation of data and discussion in §7.2 has, for the most part, focused on monomorphemic Bamana words. It has been shown that despite the historical presence of a number of minor tonal schema in the language, the Colloquial variety of Bamana has generalized or neutralized nearly all of its surface tonal melodies either to H or some instantiation of LH. Variations on these melodies are due to the application of phonological processes, e.g. affaissement, or to derivation via prefixation. Turning next to polymorphemic words in the language, it is clear from the collected Colloquial Bamana data that a common process of compacite tonale or tonal compactness described at length in the literature (e.g. Courtenay 1974; Creissels 1978, 1988, 1992; Dumestre 1984, 1987, 2003) still applies in this non-standard Bamana variety. Tonal compactness is a morphotonological phenomenon witnessed in a large variety of Bamana words that have undergone compounding and/or derivation via one or more rounds of suffixation. As Dumestre (2003) summarizes, and as has been shown briefly for causatives above, not all polymorphemic words are subject to tonal compactness. This process has been explained most simply as one by which non-initial tones are neutralized in a given polymorphemic word such that their resultant tonal melody matches the schema of the tone associated to