A Tonal Grammar of Kinyarwanda - Autosegmental and Metrical Analysis: An Autosegmental and Metrical Analysis

by Alexandre Kimenyi

Finding previous studies of the Bantu language incomplete and sometimes even wrong, Kemenyi (linguistics, ethnic studies, and African languages, California State U.-Sacramento) describes the whole tonal system of lexical tones, morphological tones, grammatical tone assignments, and all types of tone rules that are responsible for the phonetic tone output of morphemes, words, complex words, and sentences. His study also contributes to linguistic theory, especially autosegmental and metrical phonology, by showing the near impossibility of representing grammatical tones segmentally, and hence the necessity of representing them on a separate tier. The text is double spaced. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

448 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2002