Stem-initial accent and C-emphasis prosody in north-western Bantu

Mark van de Velde (1) , Dmitry Idiatov (1)

1 LLACAN - Langage, LAngues et Cultures d'Afrique Noire

Stem-initial accent has been identified in a number of NW Bantu languages. Phonetically, stem-initial accent appears to be realised only or mainly through consonant length. In order to evaluate this hypothesis, we recorded questionnaires for seven NW Bantu languages (Bapuku, Basaa, Eton, Fang, Kota, Kwasio, Bagyeli), with a particular focus on different regional varieties of A70 languages. The acoustic analysis of the data confirms the role of consonant lengthening and suggests that it is in origin an utterance-level prosodic phenomenon, which we refer to as C-emphasis prosody.

Mots clés: areal linguistics; language contact; historical linguistics; phonetics; phonology; accent; prominence; Bantu languages; African languages; prosody

Domaines: Linguistique

Mark van de Velde, Dmitry Idiatov. Stem-initial accent and C-emphasis prosody in north-western Bantu. Workshop "Areal features and linguistic reconstruction in Africa". 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, Mar 2016, Berkeley, United States. ⟨halshs-01481521⟩