Developing an Areal View of Intonation in Eastern Bantu

Abstract

This paper is an initial attempt at trying to synthesise the state-of-art in the study on intonation in Bantu languages. The goal is to specifically investigate what central features emerge in the comparison of four Bantu languages to allow us to formulate a hypothesis on areal features and variation in Eastern Bantu languages. The base language used for the comparison is Bemba, for which details of local intonational effects such as final lowering in utterances, as well as global effects, such as pitch range expansion in questions, are provided. These same questions are compared and contrasted with findings in the literature on Chichewa, Tumbuka and Shingazidja. The results show that there are a number of areas of symmetry and areas of contrast, which allow us to begin to define features where we can expect parametric variation in Eastern Bantu languages.