A tonological rarity: Tone-driven epenthesis in Ghomala’
Nicholas Rolle
December 2023 

This chapter focuses on a rarely mentioned tonological rarity – tone-driven vowel epenthesis – and argues that it is attested in the Cameroonian language Ghomala’. Specifically, an epenthetic vowel is inserted to avoid a rising tone on a syllable closed by an obstruent (e.g. /gɔ̌p/ → [gɔ̀pə́] ‘hen’), but is never triggered in other tonal contexts (e.g. /bɔ̂p/ → [bɔ̂p] ‘thorax’, *[bɔ́pə̀]). Morpho-phonological alternations show that when this rising tone is modified and lost, the epenthetic vowel is also lost, demonstrating strict co-variation between tone and segment. Unlike most cases of vowel epenthesis in the literature, epenthesis cannot be attributed solely to segmental or syllabic well-formedness. This chapter catalogues all supporting evidence for tone-driven epenthesis in Ghomala’, including instrumental analysis of recordings made approximately forty years apart. We show that while the motivation for this process is quite common typologically (avoiding a contour tone on a sub-optimal host), the repair itself (i.e. epenthesis) is virtually unprecedented in the literature.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006615 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	[Forthcoming] in Cormac Anderson, Natalia Kuznetsova, & Shelece Easterday (eds.), Rarities in phonetics and phonology. Language Science Press.
keywords:	typological rarities, tone, epenthesis, tone-segment interactions, rising contours, codas, niger-congo, phonology
previous versions:	v3 [June 2022] v2 [May 2022] v1 [May 2022]
Downloaded:	1073 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]