THE PROSODY OF TENSE MARKING IN TEKE-EBOO. A Bantu B70 language of Congo-Brazzaville

Abstract

Teke-Eboo is a Bantu B70 language spoken in Congo-Brazzaville, which displays complex tone melodies combining grammatical tone, subject agreement tone and lexical tone on verbs. This study of tense marking in Eboo identifies the tones which mark the recent past, general past and future tenses, and shows how the underlying high-low (H-L) contrastive tone system adds both downstepped H and mid (M) tones in surface realisations. Grammatical tone is also impacted by an intonational boundary L tone (L%), which causes lowering of grammatical tones utterance finally. Much earlier analysis of the prosodic features of neighbouring Teke-Kukuya (Paulian 1975, Hyman 1987) provides a helpful reference point for this study. According to Paulian, Kukuya has a stem-initial stress accent, which affects the distribution of segments and tones, as well as five tone melodies which spread over stems and even onto prefixes on the following word. In this study of tense in Eboo, I show that there is also segmental evidence for a possible stress accent on the stem-initial syllable, and that the same tone melodies as in Kukuya operate across stems and beyond, providing the key to understanding how grammatical tone marks tense on Eboo verbs.