Dr. Marjorie to present research "Logoori verb tones and the phonology-morphology interface"

Abstract: Logoori (Bantu, Kenya) has two verb classes and a rich tense-mood-aspect system in which many distinctions are marked with grammatical tone, e.g. -vʊ́gʊr-a [infinitive] ~ vʊgʊ́r-á [imperative]. I show that these tonal alternations present a puzzle reminiscent of English keep~kept and German Hand~Hände—there seems to be some kind of phonological tweaking, but only in certain morphosyntactic contexts. Accordingly, previous analyses of Logoori (Goldsmith 1991, Odden 2018) have featured a combination of ‘pieces and processes’: some tones are autosegmental exponents (pieces), while others are the output of special morphophonological rules (processes). I try out an alternative, exclusively piece-based analysis and show that it ultimately fails to account for the full Logoori pattern. This finding underscores the need for morphologically-conditioned phonology in the grammar and presents a challenge for theories that would eschew it (e.g. Haugen 2015, Bermúdez-Otero 2012).