The Tone System of Geviya
(Bantu B30/Gabon)
Lolke J. Van der Veen
Dynamique Du Langage
(UMR 5596:
CNRS/Université Lumière-Lyon 2)
vanderve@univ-lyon2.fr
0. Introduction
Geviya is a nearly extinct Bantu language spoken in the central part of Gabon and belongs to the southern subgroup of the B30 language group. Within Southern-B30, two basic types of tone systems can be distinguished: one characterized by the absence of tone spreading and another by the presence of such a tonal parameter. Geviya possesses the latter (Van der Veen 1992, 1999a, and forthcom.).
In this paper an updated version of the main lines of the tone system of this language will be presented within the framework of Nonlinear (Lexical) Phonology profitably enlarged by some aspects of Prosodic Domain Theory (cf. Hyman & Mathangwane 1998). The tone patterns observed in the language can best be accounted for by a set of lexical rules and constraints, followed by a set of postlexical rules and constraints. Some constraints occur at both levels but do not necessarily apply in the same manner. Particular attention will be paid here to the postlexical rules and constraints.
The inventory of surface tones is made up of two level tones (H and L) and two contour tones (falling and rising). The rising tone only occurs before pause as a variant of underlying H. The falling tone also has a very limited distribution: it can only be found in penultimate position, for words being underlyingly /LH/ (see below, section 2.3. example (17)). Downdrift occurs but will not be taken into account here.
From the phonological point of view, Geviya has basically four underlying tonal melodies for the nouns (ie. /H/, /L/, /HL/ and /LH/) and two for the verbs (ie. /H/ and /L/). Two additional, far less common underlying melodies have to be mentioned with regard to (mostly) trisyllabic nouns: ie. /HLH/ and /BHB/.
The domain of these tonal melodies is the phonological word, not the syllable, as shown earlier (Van der Veen 1992).
Melody Noun Gloss Melody Verb Gloss
H \mo-kwe!le!\ 'widow' H \-to!m-\ '(to)
send'
\tso!so!\ 'chicken' L \-pE~k-\ '(to)
seize'
L \mo-Be~Va~\ 'servant'
\ko~so~\ 'parrot'
HL \mo-VE!tO~\ 'woman'
\mw-a!na~\ 'child'
LH \mo-VE~nda!\ 'stranger'
\nzE~VO!\ 'panther' (N.B. Noun prefixes
are analysed
\Nga~ndo!\ 'crocodile' as tonally
unspecified.)
1. Lexical rules and constraints
By means of the Universal Association Convention, the tone melodies associate to the Tone-bearing Units (TBU) on the segmental tier in a one-to-one fashion, from left to right, as shown in the examples (1) and (2).
(1) 
(2) 
The Obligatory Contour Principle very clearly plays a role at the lexical level: no adjacent identical tones are admitted in the lexical representation of morphemes.
Whenever after the initial association one or more TBUs remain without tone, the final tone (H or L) will spread to the right, so as to have all TBUs tonally specified (see constraint WFCmin hereafter). An underlying tone may thus be associated, as a result of initial linking and subsequent spreading, to more than one TBU (see 3a). Only vowels function as TBUs in Geviya.
(3a) 
Once all TBUs are tonally specified, any H-tone followed by a L-tone will spread to the right. This rightward spread, which triggers the automatic delinking of the L-tone (see WFCmax hereafter)[1], only occurs within the domain of the noun or verb stem (see 3b). The H-tone will spread (through cyclic application) to the right as far as possible. In two-syllable and three-syllable stems the edge of the domain is reached. Four-syllable stems however strongly suggest that this H-spreading never exceeds two TBUs. The delinked L-tone is not deleted, but remains floating at this stage.
(3b) 
In short, the following rules and constraints apply to words at the lexical level of this language:
UAC (in all cases) >
WFCmin (if necessary) >
H-spreading (if possible) within the stem triggering automatic L-tone delinking (WFCmax).
2. Postlexical rules and constraints
2.1. Tone spreading
At the phrase and sentence level, rightward tone spreading also occurs, but in slightly different and more complex conditions.
(4a) 
(4b) 
The process of rightward spread is entirely conditioned by the nature of the underlying tone situated immediately at the right. If the subsequent morpheme is tonally unspecified (as in 4a) or if the following structural tone (which may be floating or linked) is low (as in 4b), spreading takes place (without immediate delinking). In case a H-tone follows immediately at the right, the tone(s) remain linked to their initial skeletal position and spreading is blocked (cf. example 5 where the H-tone associated to the initial pronominal clitic (underlined in the example) remains linked before the H-toned verb stem).
(5) 
Spreading ceases when the moving tone reaches a H-tone, as formalized in (6a/b) and shown in example (7):
(6a) 
(6b) 
(7) 
(Also see the example given in (22a/b Spreading rule).) The dissociations observed in (7) will be explained hereafter.
In accordance with the Line Crossing Ban, spreading won't go beyond the first association line in case the following tone is a multiply linked L-tone. Neither is tone allowed to spread across a second word boundary as formalized in (8):
(8) 
(9) To~ma~ Vo! p¸~nd¸~ a! Pu~Va~mu~. 'Send him into the forest of Fougamou.'
In this example the underlying H-tone of the verb stem (-toma H '(to) send') spreads to the clitic Vo ('into') on its right without going beyond.
It should also be noticed that tone spreading never occurs between the lexical subject (lexical noun phrase) and the following main verb. The strong phonosyntactic boundary that separates the verb phrase from the subject noun phrase clearly blocks spreading.
2.2. Delinking rules
Tone-delinking rules apply in two cases: (1) as a repair strategy applying when WFCmax is violated (see hereafter, example (11)), (2) when multiply linked H are preceded by L. In the latter case, delinking applies to all association lines of a multiply linked H-tone except for the final one (which will be maintained) if this particular H-tone is preceded by a (floating or associated) underlying L-tone, a tonally non-specified morpheme or a utterance-initial boundary.
This automatic partial delinking of multiply linked H following L results in tone lowering on the surface. This can be clearly seen in examples (10) and (11). In (10) the H-tone of mo-VEnda ('stranger') which has undergone spreading, is partially delinked (ie. the non-final association line) because of the underlying L-tone that precedes. (It should be stated here that in the next stage of derivation, this L-tone will undergo delinking (in order to satisfy WFCmax) and subsequently reassociation. See also example (19) below.)
(10) 
In a similar way in (11) all non-final association lines linking the
H-tone of the verb stem (\-toma\ '(to)
send') to the segmental tier are deleted because of the preceding morpheme (ie.
subject marker) which is tonally unspecified. (This is also exemplified in (7),
(15), and (16).)
(11) 
No delinking will occur whenever a H-tone precedes. In these cases, a plateau of H-tones will appear, as can be seen from (12). In (13), contrastively, the absence of such a plateau is accounted for by the delinking rule described above (cf. (10) and (11)).
(12) 
(13) 
The delinking of the L-tone in this example will be explained in the next paragraph.
2.3. The Well-formedness
Condition and repair strategies
Another important aspect is the language-specific Well-formedness Condition (WFC) according to which in Geviya not more and not less than one tone should be associated to each TBU. This WFC, which applies to items at both the lexical and the postlexical level, implies an efficient way of avoiding contour tones and downstep in Geviya. It englobes two constraints: one concerning the maximum number of tones (ie. WFCmax) and another concerning the minimum number of tones (ie. WFCmin).
Violations of these constraints will be repaired by the application of special rules. If for some reason during derivation WFCmax is violated (ie. two tones linked to one TBU), the second (L-)tone is delinked, as formalized in (14) and exemplified in (15) where the first association line of the multiply linked L-tone is deleted following the propagation of the preceding H-tone.
(14) 
(15) 
In case this delinked tone can not reassociate it will be deleted towards the end of the derivation, as shown in (16).
(16) 
The prosodically marked penultimate position (marked '*' in the examples hereafter, if relevant) is the only place where a falling HL-tone can surface. It is characterized by mora insertion. This penultimate lengthening has previously been analyzed as a licensed violation of WFCmax (see Van der Veen 1992). This view can no longer be upheld. An up-to-date analysis is proposed here, exemplified by the examples (17) and (18).
(17)
In this example, the initial L-tone of Ngando ('crocodile') is delinked after the spreading of the preceding H. This floating L-tone can reassociate after the mora insertion rule has applied. A falling HL-tone appears on the surface. In (18) however, the initial L is also delinked, but this delinking does not give rise to a floating tone. The mora insertion is followed here by a non-initial spread rule and a H-tone surfaces on the lengthened vowel (see below, WFCmin).
(18)
For the sake of convenience, the lengthening of the penultimate vowel has not been represented in the examples of this paper, with the exception of examples (17) and (18).
Finally, violations of WFCmin are repaired either by a non-initial spreading rule or by a default L-insertion rule, as exemplified by example (19).
(19) 
Also compare examples (17) and (18).
2.4. H-replacement in utterance
final position
H-replacement occurs in final position for affirmative utterances. Every H-tone in this position will be systematically replaced by a L-tone. This rule (shown in (20)), which applies after most of the other tonal rules, accounts for a specific lowering process observed in this final position. Interrogative sentences on the contrary block the application of this rule and can be accounted for by a some additional rules which will not be commented on here.
(20) 
The derivations in (22a and 22b) exemplify how and at what stage this rule applies.
2.5. The asymmetry of H and L
From what precedes, it is obvious that underlying H and L (along with the absence of tonal specification) behave asymmetrically. A H-tone can delink a L-tone initially linked to the segmental tier through a single association line, but things won't occur vice versa. This is even more clearly shown in (21) where the underlying L-tone of moVEnda ('stranger') is incapable of delinking the following H. (The non-final position of this sequence should be noticed.)
(21) 
2.6. Rule ordering
Most tonal rules in Geviya reveal to be intrinsically ordered. Postlexical rules apply in the following order:
Spreading > H-delinking following underlying L[2] >
WFCmax > WFCmin (Default L-insertion or Non-initial Spreading) >
Floating-Tone Deletion > H-Replacement.
N.B. Penultimate lengthening occurs after WFCmax and before WFCmin (cf. section 2.3.).
Most of this may be exemplified in a rather straighforward manner by the following set of (nearly) full derivations.
(22a)
N.B. For convenience, penultimate lengthening and subsequent non-initial spread rule are not represented here.
(22b)
N.B. For convenience, penultimate lengthening and subsequent tone association rule are not represented here.
3. Conclusion
Finally, by way of conclusion, it is most certainly worth mentioning that the tonal analysis of Geviya has also allowed to point out that the pronominal markers which precede the verb (ie. subject or object markers) are in fact clitics of the verb in stead of verbal prefixes, unlike what is habitually assumed for Bantu languages. That is the reason why they have been presented as such in the examples given in this paper. See Van der Veen (1999b) for a detailed demonstration of this particularly interesting point.
References
Hyman L. M. & J. T. Mathangwane (1998), Tonal domains and depressor consonants in Ikalanga, in L. M. Hyman & C. W. Kisseberth (eds.) Theoretical Aspects of Bantu Tone, Stanford, CSLI Publications, pp. 195-229.
Van der Veen L. J. (1992), Le système tonal du ge-via (Gabon), Journal of West African Languages, vol. XXII.2, Dallas, pp. 17-41.
________________ (1999a), Les Bantous eviya (Gabon-B30) : langue et société traditionnelle, note de synthèse soutenue en janvier 1999 devant l'Université Lumière-Lyon 2 en vue de l'obtention de l'Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches.
________________ (1999b), La propagation des tons et le statut des indices pronominaux précédant le verbe en geviya, in D. Creissels & J. Blanchon (eds.) Issues in Bantu Tonology, Köln: Rüdiger KÖPPE Verlag, pp. 15-36.
________________ (forthcoming), The B30 language group, in D. Nurse & G. Philippson (eds.) The Bantu Languages, London, Curzon Press.