Floating low tone and consonant voicing in Akebu

Abstract

The paper deals with floating low tone and consonant voicing in Akebu, historically induced by the nasal velar ŋ. The phenomena manifest in combination as nominal and agreement markers in a number of noun classes, as well as in independent pronouns. I argue against the analysis of paired voiced consonants as positional variants of their voiceless counterparts after the floating low tone found in the previous literature. This study proposes that floating low tone is considered only as a special case of the low tone and does not differ from the low tone on overt markers in any respect. Accordingly, paired voiced consonants are viewed as independent phonemes, while keeping in mind that they have acquired their phonemic status recently.

Phonological and acoustic properties of ATR in the vowel system of Akebu (Kwa)

“…In addition to 11 vowels, Akebu has 24 consonants /p b t d ʈ ɖ c ɟ k g kp gb m n ɲ ŋ f v s z h l y w/ and 3 level tones: low (L), mid (M) and high (H) (Makeeva 2022a). The tone-bearing unit (TBU) in Akebu is the syllable.…”

“…To provide morphological context for the description of the harmony patterns, we will briefly present the basic word structure of Akebu (see Makeeva & Shluinsky 2018; Makeeva 2022a; Shluinsky 2022). In Akebu, nouns are marked for class, and verbs, numerals and pronouns agree in class with nouns.…”

“…In addition to the third person forms, there are object locutor forms, where also /ə/ occurs: /mɨ́/ 1sg , /lə̀/ 2sg , /lə́/ 1pl , /nɨ́/ 2pl . The сontrastive pronouns are derived from the object ones and contain the same distribution of vowels (Makeeva 2022a). These examples strongly suggest the [−ATR] value of /ᵻ, ə/.…”