earticle

영어

This study is mainly a description of the function of tone in Kilega and a phonological analysis of the behavior of tone in verbal structures. This paper first shows the phonemic role of tone in the language. Secondly, it introduces five phonetic tones including two contour tones. It then analyzes the tonal behavior in verbal structures. Kilega verbs are divided into two types: low-tone verbs and high-tone verbs. Both low-tone verbs and high-tone verbs have their L or H in the first syllable only underlyingly. The tones of the remaining syllables are determined by tone deletion, spreading, downstep, and default association. The tonal downstep involving some verbal prefixes supports the idea of the expanded verbal stem domain, which incorporates the object prefix. This study has its importance also in its description of an endangered, poorly investigated language with few native speakers.