For decades the assumption in traditional phonology has been that URs had the two functions of (i) capturing generalizations (“what’s in the language”) and (ii) capturing the speaker’s knowledge (“what’s in the head”). Bantu languages have been among those providing evidence of robust morphophonemic alternations of the sort captured by URs in generative phonology. In this paper I take a new loo...

In this paper I examine how quantification is expressed in Logoori, a Luyia (Bantu) language spoken in western Kenya. I focus on the two universal quantifiers in Logoori, viz., vuri ‘every’ and -oosi ‘all’. I show that these two quantifiers display a number of syntactic and semantic differences and present a compositional analysis to account for those differences. Throughout, I discuss how the ...

The issue of Bantu vowel height harmony is one that most serious theories of phonology have addressed at one time or another. As is quite well-known, the majority of an estimated 500± Bantu languages exhibit some variant of a progressive harmony process by which vowels lower when preceded by an appropriate (lower) trigger. In this paper I have three goals. First, I present a comprehensive treat...

Kinship provides the fundamental structure of human society: descent determines the inheritance pattern between generations, whereas residence rules govern the location a couple moves to after they marry. In turn, descent and residence patterns determine other key relationships such as alliance, trade, and marriage partners. Hunter-gatherer kinship patterns are viewed as flexible, whereas agric...

There is disagreement about the routes taken by populations speaking Bantu languages as they expanded to cover much of sub-Saharan Africa. Here, we build phylogenetic trees of Bantu languages and map them onto geographical space in order to assess the likely pathway of expansion and test between dispersal scenarios. The results clearly support a scenario in which groups first moved south throug...

1. In groups of South African Bantu and Caucasian women aged 3 M years, sub-divided into those having had (i) none to two or (ii) seven or more children, measurements of radiographs of the second metacarpal and of the humerus were made in respect of length, cortical thickness, cortical index, cortical area/total area, cross-sectional area index and cortical/surface area ratio. 2. In Bantu mothe...

The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of “zeroing out” a tone in the above sense: When is an opposition properly analyzed as the presence vs. absence of a tone, rather than two different indications of tone, e.g. a + vs. of a tone feature?1 Although phonetic pitch (Fo) is scalar in nature, phonological (categorical) tone frequently has a privative character. The most frequent situat...

SYNOPSIS Twenty-seven specimens of human tissue, obtained by operation, were tested to evaluate the theory that iron uptake by tissues from serum is greater when transferrin is nearly completely saturated than when the degree of saturation is normal. Samples of each tissue were incubated in autologous serum so prepared that in one instance the transferrin was 50% saturated and in the second 90%...

The article investigates the realization of adjacent high tones across word boundaries in Tswana, a Southern Bantu language. The results show that downstep, a lowering of the second in a series of adjacent high tones, takes place across word boundaries within the same phonological phrase. Downstep does not occur across phonological phrase boundaries. The study confirms an empirical phenomenon a...