The phrasal tonology of Zinza

The phrasal tonology of Zinza (Bantu, Tanzania) can be described in terms of four major processes, namely deletion of H from phrase-medial inflected verbs, insertion of H on the first of two toneless words, leftward shift of word-final H tone, & rightward spreading of penultimate H tone in phrase-medial position. The purpose of this paper is to describe these processes in detail. Specifying the syntactic conditions under which the processes of tone insertion & deletion apply is not trivial, as they do not apply to syntactically postposed subject noun phrases (NPs) or to verbs containing an object prefix that is coreferential to an immediately following NP. It is argued that the source of this complication is a distinctive constituent structure arising from syntactic dislocation & that once the structural distinctions in constituent structure are understood, the tonal properties of these constructions follow immediately. 26 References. Adapted from the source document