Realisations of a single high tone in Northern Sotho

Abstract

This article reports on a production study that investigates the realisation of a single high tone in the verbal constituent in Northern Sotho, a Bantu language spoken in South Africa. The parameters of variation investigated are based on existing descriptive and theoretical literature and relate to numbers of syllables in the verb stem, morphosyntactic constituency and verb-internal morphological boundaries. The results are interpreted as both phonological and phonetic influences on high tone realisation in this language: phonologically, a high-toned object concord causes a peak shift one syllable to the right. Phonetically, the study shows that the F0 peak associated with a high tone is not necessarily reached within the syllable carrying the high tone but only later (peak delay) depending on the segmental make-up of the tone-bearing syllable and its position within the utterance. The segmental make-up of the tone-bearing syllable leads to systematic surface variation in tone realisation. By collecting controlled acoustic data on tone realisation, this study provides a ground for cross-dialectal comparison of Southern Bantu tone.

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2009, 27(4): 357–380