Within the expanding framework of non-linear morphology, no wordformation process has sparked more interest than reduplication. Once relegated to a secondary status with a few examples, reduplication has now arrived centre stage as a testing ground for alternative theories of multitiered morphology and phonology. The innovative work of McCarthy (1981) and Marantz (1982) on this subject has laid the groundwork for subsequent formal treatments of reduplication, including Levin (1983), Broselow & McCarthy (1984), Clements (1985), Odden & Odden (1985), Schlindwein (1986, 1988), McCarthy & Prince (forthcoming), Kiparsky (1986), Mester (1986) and Steriade (1988), among others. These varying accounts of reduplication have been tested against a large and growing body of data from most parts of the world. Surprising to us, however, since every Bantu language we are familiar with has one or more reduplicative processes, relatively little attention has been focused on this rather large linguistic group of several hundred languages coverin a major part of the African continent.

Transparency—in which a harmony effect passes over a segment without affecting it phonetically or phonologically—has been a controversial concept in previous literature on harmony systems. A typical case of so-called transparency involves cross-height vowel harmony in Kinande, a Bantu language (J.40). Previous accounts have analyzed low vowels in this system as being transparent to harmony [Schlindwein, NELS 17, 551–567 (1987)]. Further, some analysts have considered low vowels theoretically incapable of undergoing tongue root harmony. These claims were tested in a single-subject field study using ultrasound imaging to measure tongue root position in low vowels. Results indicate that (a) advanced versus retracted tongue root position (ATR) is a viable feature for describing the phonological distinction in the vowel system; (b) there is a phonetic difference between low vowels when adjacent to ATR triggering vowels; (c) this distinction in low vowels does not decrease with distance from trigger vowels, suggesting that these vowels are undergoing phonological harmony rather than phonetic assimilation; and finally, (d) the ATR distinction is phonetically categorical in high vowels, but shows crossover in mid and low vowels. Implications for phonological theory and phonetics-phonology interface will be discussed. [Work supported by NSERC and SSHRC.]

This paper addresses theoretical issues confronting cross-height harmony systems through an experimental study of Kinande, a Bantu language of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Using a combination of acoustic analysis and lingual ultrasound imaging, we evaluate previous proposals concerning the phonetic correlates of the harmonic vowel feature and the transparency of low vowels. Results indicate that (i) although a multivalued scalar acoustic feature in F1/F2 space is not adequate to distinguish all vowel categories in Kinande, the cross-height feature does correlate acoustically with F1, (ii) the cross-height feature of Kinande involves systematic tongue-root articulations and (iii) low vowels in Kinande are not neutral to harmony in the way reported in earlier work, but exhibit significant and systematic tongue-root advancement and retraction according to the dictates of harmony.* Thanks to Nick Clements for comments on an earlier draft of this paper as well as the associate editor and three anonymous reviewers. This work was supported by an NSERC grant to Bryan Gick and a SSHRC grant to Douglas Pulleyblank.

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