LING Colloquium: Lauren Eby Clemens (SUNY Albany)

The Prosody of Rutooro Adnominals

Rutooro is a Bantu language of Uganda that lacks lexical tone. Instead, prominence in Rutooro is marked with a High tone (H) on the penultimate syllable of the phonological phrase (φ-phrase). Like many languages in the family, syntactic XPs reliably correspond to φ-phrases; however, we find a previously unattested pattern in the prosody of Rutooro adnominal phrases. Head nouns are marked H when they combine with strong determiners, adjectives with augment vowels, and full RCs. In contrast, nouns do not bear an H tone when they combine with weak determiners, augment-less adjectives, and reduced RCs. We propose that the distribution of H tones serves as a diagnostic for whether an adnominal is generated in a DP-internal or external position. Reduced object RCs with overt subjects are a special case: the head of the reduced object RC bears an unexpected H tone, while the subject is all-Low despite the fact that it is a self-contained XP. We demonstrate why these data challenge prominent theories of the syntax-prosody interface, ultimately concluding that the attested phrasing repairs a prosodic ambiguity that could otherwise point to illicit syntactic constituency.

Lauren Eby Clemens is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Program in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at University at Albany, State University of New York.