Tonology

In practice, the deciphering of complex verbal tonology is done in reverse: to arrive at the lexical and morphological tones, one typically has to factor out the postlexical tone rules. Since nominal tonology is usually more transparent, it can be used as a guide to unravel the tonology of verbs.

Anomalies such as those found in the comparative tonology of these three language divisions indicate antecedent morphological or morphosyntactic features that would otherwise have gone unnoticed by the historical analyst.

This thesis represents a beginning rather than an ending. Specifically, it is an attempt to explore the tonology of Venda (more correctly, Tshiveṉdá), a Bantu language spoken in the Zoutpansberg district of the Northern Transvaal in South Africa as well as in parts of Zimbabwe.

In the introduction to this paper, it was stated that the asymmetric tonology of Yorùbá in no way marked the language out as unique. To help set the language in a wider context, some aspects of the tonology of two related languages are now described. One of these, like Yorùbá, has three surface tone heights, while the other has four. It is shown that the tonologies of these languages are also consistent with the hypothesis that 'Low Tone', in West Africa, is not [L].

The present study aims to characterise the Colognian rise-fall with respect to its tonology as well as its conversational functions.