Article published in:
Language Typology and Historical Contingency: In honor of Johanna NicholsEdited by Balthasar Bickel, Lenore A. Grenoble, David A. Peterson and Alan Timberlake
[Typological Studies in Language 104] 2013
► pp. 309–330
Penultimate lengthening in Bantu
Analysis and spread
Larry M. Hyman | University of California, Berkeley
It is often remarked that Eastern and Southern Bantu languages that have lost the historical Proto-Bantu vowel-length contrast tend to have a process of penultimate lengthening (PL). However, there has never been a general, cross-linguistic survey of the phenomenon. In this paper I (i) delimit the geographical distribution of PL; (ii) determine the domain within which PL occurs: it is assumed that the process was innovated before pause, later “narrowing” to the right edge of phrases, then words; (iii) survey the factors that contribute to or block PL; and (iv) propose a historical relationship between PL and the restriction of length contrasts to metrically strong positions (penultimate, antepenultimate), which, I argue, leads to the ultimate loss of contrastive length.
Published online: 13 December 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.104.14hym
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.104.14hym
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
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Seifart, Frank, Jan Strunk, Swintha Danielsen, Iren Hartmann, Brigitte Pakendorf, Søren Wichmann, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann & Balthasar Bickel
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