{"id":754,"date":"2019-06-12T18:32:13","date_gmt":"2019-06-12T18:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=754"},"modified":"2022-08-02T23:55:38","modified_gmt":"2022-08-02T23:55:38","slug":"exceptions-to-reduplication-in-kinande","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/exceptions-to-reduplication-in-kinande\/","title":{"rendered":"Exceptions to reduplication in Kinande"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mutaka & Hyman’s (1990) study of reduplication in Kinande<\/a>, a Bantu language spoken in “Eastern Zaire” (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), is the sort of phonology study one doesn’t see much of anymore. The authors begin by noting the recent interest in reduplication phenomena, but note that most of the major work has completely ignored Bantu, an enormous language family in which nearly every language has one or more type of reduplication. Mutaka & Hyman (MH) proceed to describe Kindande reduplication in detail, with only occasional reference to other languages.<\/p>\n

Nouns that undergo reduplication have the semantics of roughly ‘the real X’. Most Kinande verbs also undergo reduplication, with the semantics of roughly ‘to hurriedly X’ or ‘to repetitively X’. Verbal reduplication is somewhat more interesting because certain other verbal suffixes (or “extensions”, as they’re sometimes called in Bantu) may also be found in the reduplicant, argued to be a roughly-bisyllabic prefix.\u00a0 For instance, the passive suffix is argued to be underlyingly \/u\/ but surfaces as [w], and is copied over in reduplication. Thus for the verb hum<\/em> ‘beat’ the passive\u00a0e-ri-hum-w-a\u00a0<\/em>‘to be beaten’\u00a0reduplicates as\u00a0erihumwa<\/span>humwa<\/em>. However, larger vowel-consonant verbal suffixes are not copied; the applied (-ir-<\/em>) passive infinitive e-ri-hum-ir-w-a<\/em> ‘to be beaten for’ has a reduplicated form\u00a0erihuma<\/span>humirwa<\/em>,<\/em> and for the verb tum\u00a0<\/em>‘send’ the applied passive reciprocal (-an-<\/em>) infinitive e-r\u00ed-tum-ir-an-w-a\u00a0<\/em>‘to be sent to each other’ has a reduplicated form\u00a0er\u00edtuma<\/span>tumiranwa <\/em>(MH, 56).<\/p>\n

What’s even more interesting to me is the behavior of verb stems with what MH call ‘unproductive’ extensions (all of which appear to be vowel-consonant). MH report that for only a small minority of these verb stems is there any plausible etymological relationship to a verb without the extension. One example is luh-uk<\/strong>-a <\/em>‘take a rest’ which is plausibly related to luh-a<\/em> ‘be tired’ (MH, 73e), but there is no *b\u00e1t-a<\/em>\u00a0paired with b\u00e1t-uk<\/strong>-a<\/em> ‘move’ (MH, 74d). Verb stems bearing unproductive suffixes may have one of three behaviors with respect to reduplication. For some such stems, reduplication is forbidden: er\u00edbugul<\/strong><\/em>a ‘to find’. For others, reduplication occurs but the ‘unproductive’ extension is stranded (the same behavior as the ‘productive’ extensions): e-r\u00ed-banguk<\/strong>-a ‘to jump about’ <\/em>reduplicates as er\u00ed<\/em>banga<\/span>banguk<\/strong>a<\/em>. Finally, some such stems (roughly half) unexpectedly build a trisyllabic (rather than bisyllabic) reduplicant consisting of the verb root and the unproductive extension:\u00a0e-ri-hurut<\/strong>-a\u00a0<\/em>‘to snore’ reduplicates as\u00a0erihurut<\/strong>a<\/span>hurut<\/strong>a <\/em>(MH, 75). This entire distribution poses a fascinating puzzle. How is the failure of reduplication encoded in the first case? What licenses the trisyllabic reduplicant in the last case?<\/p>\n

References<\/h1>\n

Mutaka, Ngessimo and Hyman, Larry M. 1990. Syllables and morpheme integrity in Kinande reduplication.\u00a0Phonology<\/em> 7: 73-119.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mutaka & Hyman’s (1990) study of reduplication in Kinande, a Bantu language spoken in “Eastern Zaire” (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), is the sort of phonology study one doesn’t see much of anymore. The authors begin by noting the recent interest in reduplication phenomena, but note that most of the major work has … Continue reading “Exceptions to reduplication in Kinande”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-phonology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=754"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":757,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions\/757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}