Niger-Congo and adjacent areas.

Abstract: 

This chapter maps out the tonal, accentual, and intonational properties of sub- Saharan African languages, focusing particularly on Niger-Congo. It distinguishes tone systems by the number of contrastive tone heights and contours and their tonal distributions, as well as grammatical functions of tone. It considers positional prominence effects potentially analysed as word accent and concludes with discussion of both intonational pitch and length marking syntactic domains and clause types.

Author: 
Hannah L. Sande
Florian A. J. Lionnet
Nicholas R. Rolle
Emily C. Clem
Publication date: 
January 1, 2021
Publication type: 
Recent Publication
Citation: 
Hyman, L. M., Sande, H., Lionnet, F., Rolle, N. & Clem, E. Niger-Congo and adjacent areas. In C. Gussenhoven & A. Chen (eds), Handbook of Prosody, Vol. IV, Prosodic systems, pp.183-194. Oxford: Oxford University Press.