OCP effects in Malawian CiTonga tone patterns

Abstract

The Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) has been shown to both motivate certain tonological processes, as well as act as a constraint, blocking an otherwise productive process. In this paper, we describe and analyze the role of the OCP in Malawian CiTonga, an under-described Malawian Bantu language. We show that OCP violations involving High tones are sometimes repaired and sometimes not. When they are repaired, there is not a single repair strategy, but five possible ones, where the strategy employed depends on two crucial factors: 1) the morpho-syntactic domain containing the two High tones, and 2) whether the H autosegments in question are linked to a single TBU or multiple TBUs. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Keywords

• tone
• Obligatory Contour Principle
• CiTonga
• Bantu