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In this paper we show that certain consonants have the effect of depressing the tone on adjacent vowels in Malawian CiTonga, a Bantu language spoken mainly in Nkhata Bay. We argue that some of these effects are phonological, changing High vowels to Low. In other cases the effect is not categorical, but gradient, as certain consonants have a greater lowering effect than others on the tone of the adjacent vowel. For these cases we propose the effect is phonetic overall. Still, we demonstrate that in these latter cases where the lowering effect is most pronounced, there are near-neutralization effects, which in some cases can lead to neutralization and homophony in the judgment of native speakers. We make some general typological observations, comparing the set of depressor consonants in CiTonga to other Bantu languages.

This paper presents the noun class system of Bwala, a nearly undocumented and undescribed Bantu language of the Teke group spoken in the Kinshasa Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Genealogically speaking, Bwala belongs to the Kasai-Ngounie (Extended) subclade, one of the major monophyletic groups within West-Coastal Bantu. Bwala has seven singular classes (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 14, 15) and five plural classes (2, 4, 6, 8, 10) which form nine singular/plural noun class pairings (1/2, 3/4, 5/6, 5/10, 5/4, 7/8, 7/6, 9/6, 14/6). The paper furthermore addresses the diachronic changes which the Bwala noun class system underwent with respect to Proto-Bantu (PB). We compare these to the changes identified by Hyman, Lionnet, and Ngolele (2019) for Teke-Ewo, a closely related variety, with the aim of identifying morphological innovations shared between varieties of the so-called Teke group (Bantu B70).

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.

This article provides an overview of the numerous exceptional morphosyntactic and phonological properties of the reflexive compared to other object prefixes in Bantu languages. These properties are considered in light of Marlo's (2014, 2015, to appear) micro-typological studies of Bantu object marking, and the proposal that the 1sg object prefix and the reflexive may be in a position closer to the verb stem than other object prefixes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bantu language T/A systems often present challenging analytical conundrums, as is the case, for example, with languages in eastern zones F and S, whose systems are representative of the kinds of contrasts found across the Bantu landscape. In several cases, languages in the different zones resemble one another more than they do languages in the same zone. Working within the scaled dissociative domain temporal model proposed in Botne and Kershner (2008) and Botne (2010, 2012), the author provides an explanation for why this striking variation occurs. The paper addresses several specific issues: (1) how a remote construction can become a resultative; (2) why similar, or even identical, remote forms in Kirangi dialects are conceptually distinct; and (3) why several forms are temporally reversed in some languages. Innovation that has led to the peculiar differences observed finds an explanation and motivation in differences in time scales, time regions, and time scope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this paper is in formulating a framework where the relationship between such units toponyms, ethnonyms and glossonyms is established in a systematic way. This framework is better presented using Bantu languages in which toponyms, ethnonyms and glossonyms correlate through the same stems.