Tonal and Non-Tonal Intonation in Shekgalagari

The study of intonation in a (fully) tone language presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to see how a language which exploits F0 mainly for the purpose of lexical and grammatical contrasts succeeds in encoding the functions often expressed by means of intonation in non-tonal languages. As is well-known, word-level distinctions can be quite rich in tone systems, which contrast up to five pitch levels and a dozen or more tonal contours or clusters, e.g. Wobe (Kru; Liberia) (Bearth & Link 1980, Singler 1984). Word-level tones, in turn, can be subject to considerable manipulation by the postlexical phonology, where juxtaposition, syntactic conditioning, or phonological phrasing can modify the word-level inputs and introduce additional pitch features, e.g. the phonological phrase-final H% boundary tone of Kinande (Bantu; Democratic Republic of the Congo) (Hyman 1990). Particularly when tone systems are complex in these ways, the question is how there can be much room left for intonation to modify or add pitch specifications without obscuring the word-level tonal contrasts. The goal of this paper is to examine how Shekgalagari (Bantu; Botswana, Namibia), a language which exploits F0 mainly for the purpose of lexical and grammatical contrasts, succeeds in encoding the functions often expressed by means of intonational phonology in non-tonal languages. Whereas other languages with lexical tone adopt different strategies for incorporating intonational pitch features, we demonstrate that most of the intonational marking is non-tonal in Shekgalagari, thereby raising the question of what is a possible intonational system.