1 Overview

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the phonology of the Chichewa language, a Bantu language, as it is spoken in Malawi.* The book is the second in the Phonology of the World's Languages series on a Bantu language, the first being on Kimatuumbi, spoken in Tanzania (Odden Reference Odden1996). Downing & Mtenje (the second author is a native speaker of Chichewa) provide broad coverage of phonological phenomena typical of Bantu languages, and African languages more generally. The book contains extensive data from Chichewa, and is written overall in a very accessible style, so as to be useful not only to specialists working on African languages, but also to students and other researchers interested in understanding Bantu phonology and its place in phonological typology. The authors themselves indicate that the book is meant to provide a relatively ‘theory-neutral’ account of the phonology of Chichewa; as I will demonstrate throughout this review, there is considerable variation in the amount of theory discussed from chapter to chapter, as well as how committed the authors are to particular theoretical models.

2 Introductory chapters

Chapter 1 of the book provides a brief introduction to the language, including helpful maps of the regions of Malawi in which Chichewa and other languages are spoken and the alphabetical Guthrie zones for southern Africa (Guthrie Reference Guthrie1967–71; Chichewa is zone N.31). The authors are clear to point out that there are many dialects of Chichewa spoken in Malawi, and that the variety they focus on in the book is spoken in the central region of the country; this is the dialect on which the standard variety of Chichewa is based.

Chapter 2 proceeds with a basic grammatical sketch of the language, including segment inventories, an introduction to the orthography of the language, and a basic overview of the tonal system. The chapter also provides a description of key aspects of the morphology of Chichewa (and Bantu more broadly), describing the system of noun-class prefixes and the order of elements of the verb word, a list of verbal extensions and adjectives/adverbials.

3 Segmental phonology and syllable structure

The real heart of the work begins with Chapter 3, which discusses the segmental phonology of consonants. We first learn in §3.1 that different varieties of Chichewa feature different fricative and affricate inventories, with the standard variety featuring the largest inventory (contrasting /ts/ and /dz/ as well as /ʧ/ and /ʤ/), and other regional dialects featuring smaller inventories with only alveopalatal affricates. The authors suggest different sources for this cross-dialectal variation: while they mention ‘replacement’ of alveolar affricates with alveopalatal affricates in the Nkhotakota variety of Chichewa (p. 45), they posit a change from alveolar affricates to fricatives in the Chiradzulu and Zomba dialects. Implicit in the overall analysis is the idea that the standard dialect of Chichewa is the most conservative of the dialects, though it is not entirely clear from the data provided that this needs to be the case. The chapter continues (§3.2) by discussing the consonant inventory of Proto-Bantu, which featured only alveopalatal affricates and fricatives. One might reason that varieties such as Nkhotakota, which also only has alveopalatal affricates, have stayed closer to the Proto-Bantu inventory, and that the standard variety is in fact the more innovative dialect. §3.2 provides a clear overview of Meyer's (Reference Meyer1936–37) influential work tracing the development of fricatives in (standard) Chichewa to spirantisation of consonants preceding super-close vowels in Proto-Bantu. §3.3 provides extensive data to demonstrate distributional patterns of consonants, highlighting the privileged status of the first consonant of the stem, which can feature any consonant in the inventory (while non-initial positions only feature a subset of the consonants). §3.4 describes the very common process of homorganic nasal assimilation in nasal–consonant (NC) sequences, and the less common pattern of postnasal stop aspiration, whereby postnasal unaspirated voiceless stops become aspirated. Chapter 3 concludes with an interesting pair of morphologically conditioned consonant mutations. The first is a root-initial alternation in the class 5/6 singular–plural forms of nouns in which roots such as thuumba ‘bag’ are realised with an aspirated voiceless stop in the singular class 5, but with a plain voiceless stop following the plural class 6 prefix, leading to the form ma-tuumba for ‘bags’. The second type of consonant mutation applies in causative verb forms, such that words like tuluuka ‘come out’ are realised with an affricate (or fricative, in some cases) on the final consonant, giving tuluutsa ‘bring out’ (p. 64). The authors refer to a diachronic analysis by Hyman (Reference Hyman2003), suggesting that both these alternations can be traced to the presence of a super-close vowel in the Proto-Bantu forms, while being treated synchronically as morphologically conditioned alternations.

Chapter 4 introduces the five-vowel inventory of Chichewa (§4.1). The authors discuss the marginal status of contrastive vowel length, providing minimal pairs which they note (i) are neutralised for vowel length in isolation (due to phrase-level penultimate lengthening), and (ii) are actually cued by other elements, such as tone. The authors conclude that these facts have negatively impacted the productivity of vowel length as a contrastive feature in Chichewa. §4.2 provides data demonstrating positional restrictions on vowels, which, similarly to consonants, are more diverse in stem-initial position. §4.3 and §4.4 delve into patterns of vowel-height harmony (VHH), by which the vowel in stem-initial position controls harmony for the rest of the stem, except for the final vowel. The authors review Hyman's (Reference Hyman, Hombert and Hyman1999) overview of ‘canonical’ Bantu vowel-height harmony for the uninitiated reader, including asymmetries in the harmony behaviour of front vs. back vowels, the status of low vowels as blockers but not triggers or targets, and the morphological conditioning of VHH. Chichewa has all of these elements in its vowel-harmony system. §4.4 breaks somewhat with the ‘theory-neutral’ descriptions of the preceding chapters by introducing formal analyses of VHH patterns in Chichewa. However, rather than discussing the patterns within any one theoretical framework, the authors opt for a more inclusive approach, first by introducing the classic issues pertaining to VHH (e.g. why are root-initial syllables triggers, and suffixes targets?; why do peripheral vowels form a natural class for harmony, whereas mid vowels form a separate class?), and then working through three different theoretical treatments of VHH. These include Moto's (Reference Moto1989) underspecification approach, Beckman's (Reference Beckman1997) autosegmental spreading approach within Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky Reference Prince and Smolensky1993) and the element/licensing approach advocated by a number of scholars, including the first author (Downing Reference Downing2010). Downing & Mtenje describe the pros and cons of each approach in a way that even a novice phonologist could comprehend. Given that vowel harmony and other long-distance phonological processes have been a major focus in phonology in recent years, this chapter is a timely contribution to illustrating how Bantu languages fit into the theoretical and typological picture for vowel harmony.

Chapter 5 begins by providing an overview of syllable types, which are mainly CV, but also include CGV and NCV. In §5.2, the authors discuss evidence for and against the treatment of CV and NC sequences as clusters vs. unary segments. The treatment of NC elements is highly debated among Bantu linguists, and the difference between a cluster-based and a unary analysis can be difficult to establish using traditional empirical methods in phonology. One piece of evidence that Downing & Mtenje use to support a cluster-based analysis of NC sequences is the ordering of gestures in these forms: the nasal gesture, they argue, must always precede the consonantal gesture (which would not necessarily be the case if these NC forms constituted single units). Indeed, work within the framework of Articulatory Phonology has found that NC sequences in some Bantu languages show similar timing to NC sequences in English, where, unlike in many Bantu languages, NC can never occur as a word onset (Browman & Goldstein Reference Browman and Goldstein1986). Downing & Mtenje note at the end of the chapter that, as discussed in Hyman & Ngunga (Reference Hyman and Ngunga1997), there may be more than just one cluster type, a possibility that is also supported cross-linguistically by articulatory research (see, for example, Goldstein et al. Reference Goldstein, Chitoran, Selkirk, Trouvain and Barry2007 and Shaw et al. Reference Shaw, Gafos, Hoole and Zeroual2009, Reference Shaw, Gafos, Hoole and Zeroual2011). §5.2 ends with the authors encouraging further phonetic and phonological research into the syllabification of NC sequences. §5.3 continues with a discussion of epenthetic vowels in loanwords, whose features vary depending on phonological context. The authors discuss a range of strategies for epenthesis, including default vowel epenthesis, vowel copying and assimilation to a neighbouring segment. §5.4 takes up syllabic nasals (these differ from the non-syllabic nasals discussed in §5.3), which are largely derived from nasal-initial prefixes. Several interesting patterns of syllable contraction are discussed. These patterns result in the presence of a syllabic nasal segment which is tone-bearing, and is not homorganic to the following segment (again, in contrast with the NC sequences considered in §5.2). Finally, §5.5 covers the syllabification of vowel sequences. Various strategies for vowel-hiatus resolution are discussed; the particular strategy used (e.g. glide insertion or vowel deletion) depends on the morphological context.

4 Tone

No description of a Bantu language would be complete without a chapter on tone, and this book presents a spectacular three chapters’ worth of tone coverage (in addition to smaller discussions of tone in other chapters). Chapter 6 covers lexical tone patterns, and Chapters 7 and 8 deal with grammatical tone patterns in affirmative and negative verb constructions respectively. Chapter 6 begins by providing a description of the tone system of Chichewa, which is a canonical Bantu tone system including two tone levels, a number of phonological processes affecting tone (such as spreading and shifting) and tonal marking of various morphosyntactic functions. §6.2 provides all of the possible tone melodies for nouns and verbs. Following previous work, the authors opt to treat syllables as either high or toneless, as opposed to high vs. low. Nouns are shown to exhibit all possible combinations of high and toneless syllables across different positions for disyllabic words, whereas verbs either carry no tone or a single high tone. The authors discuss various verbal extensions which can also introduce tone to the verb word (or ‘macrostem’).

§6.3 and §6.4 cover a number of phonological processes in Chichewa which are common across Bantu, including penultimate syllable lengthening, tone doubling, tone plateauing, retraction and shift. These processes feature prominently throughout the rest of the book, and are crucial for understanding aspects of prosodic structure and morphosyntax. There are a lot of processes to keep straight, and in some instances, the data provided may be somewhat confusing to less experienced readers, since multiple processes may have applied in a given form where the authors are attempting to draw attention to a single process. An example is (12a) on p. 117, where the word n-khúngulusyá ‘burnt grass remains’ has apparently undergone both tone doubling (leading to the intermediate form n-khúngúlusyá) and retraction, such that the surface form of the word is n-khúngúluúsyá, where the reader, looking only for tone doubling, might have expected n-khúngúluusyá. Keeping track of tones in written forms is something many Bantuists become very adept at after years of practice, but it certainly doesn't come naturally to most at first. While use of underlining, derivations and autosegmental diagrams later in the chapter are helpful in highlighting tonal processes, similar diagrams and text effects might have been helpful earlier on in the chapter for aiding the reader to see how various processes have applied.

§6.3 and §6.4 provide lovely data on the applications of Meeussen's Rule (the equivalent of the Obligatory Contour Principle for tone; Meeussen Reference Meeussen1963), illustrating how adjacent underlying high tones are avoided through a number of means, including tone deletion and blocking of tone shift. §6.5 includes a brief overview of phonetic research on Bantu languages, including a nod to Myers' (Reference Myers1998, Reference Myers1999) pioneering phonetic work on tonal processes and F0 timing. The section concludes with a renewed call to action for additional phonetic work on Chichewa and other Bantu languages. Finally, the authors touch in §6.6 on accentual properties of Chichewa tone, appealing to Hyman's (Reference Hyman2006) property-driven approach stipulating culminativity, demarcativeness and obligatoriness as key features of an accentual system; Downing & Mtenje discuss how all three of these properties can be seen to apply to high tones in Chichewa, through a combination of lexical tone assignment and application of tone rules such as Meeussen's Rule.

Another exciting contribution of this book is the broad coverage of grammatical tone patterns in Chapters 7 and 8. There has been a growing interest in recent years in understanding grammatical (or ‘melodic’) tone patterns in Bantu languages (see, for example, Odden & Bickmore Reference Odden and Bickmore2014a, Reference Odden and Bickmoreb), as Bantu tone is known to behave differently across different tenses, aspects, moods, polarities and clause types. For the most part, these chapters discuss how tone patterns on verb roots interact with those of morphemes occurring in various morphosyntactic frames, and how many of the processes described in Chapter 6 apply across these different contexts. In particular, a number of environments are highlighted (such as the recent past tense, described in §7.5.3) in which tonal patterns cannot be transparently explained through the association of a tone with a particular morpheme or tone rule; instead, it seems that the tone pattern of the entire phrase is somehow ‘transformed’ from one context to another. §8.3 is dedicated to representations of grammatical tone patterns, including the possibility that similar grammatical tone melodies may reflect some sort of natural semantic class (the authors demonstrate that this is not the case), or that different grammatically based tone patterns may ‘compete’ for the surface form (which they show is likely to be the case). Crucially, Downing & Mtenje demonstrate that the tone melody of the whole verb word – not just a single morpheme – must be taken into account in order to fully understand tone assignment in these diverse grammatical contexts.Footnote ¹

5 Prosody

Chapter 9 takes up prosodic restrictions on word formation and morpheme structure. §9.1 deals with the disyllabic minimality constraint on words; vowel epenthesis is described as one process which ensures the minimality condition is met. §9.2 discusses a process of syllable contraction on the locative prefix mu- which causes it to be realised as syllabic [m̩]. The authors suggest that in order for the process to occur, the form to which the morpheme attaches must be disyllabic; however, given the syllabic status of the nasal (which the authors provide compelling evidence for in Chapter 5), it is unlikely that this process is driven by a word-level minimality constraint. §9.2 and §9.3 deal with nominal and verbal reduplication respectively. The authors argue (echoing Downing Reference Downing2003, as well as others) that reduplication is a compounding process which applies to stems. The authors also outline (and reject) alternative arguments in favour of treating the base of reduplication as a prosodic word.

Chapter 10 deals with prosodic phrasing and its relation to syntax in Chichewa, a discussion which has interesting implications for the syntax–phonology interface. The authors contrast three main analyses of prosodic phrasing in Chichewa: Kanerva's (Reference Kanerva, Inkelas and Zec1990) syntactic account, Truckenbrodt's (Reference Truckenbrodt1995, Reference Truckenbrodt1999) WrapXP account and Cheng & Downing's (Reference Cheng and Downing2016) syntactic phase-based account, and conclude that a phase-based account is necessary to capture, in particular, the unusual prosodic behaviour of the VP. This chapter deviates considerably from the more ‘theory-neutral’ approach in most of the rest of the book, and the uninitiated reader will likely have difficulty following the discussion of theoretical devices such as syntactic phases (which are cited in reference to Chomsky Reference Chomsky and Kenstowicz2001, but never really given a proper general description). However, the theoretical issues at stake are of great interest within the field, and are therefore worth describing, if only in brief. The chapter concludes by questioning whether or not separate Phonological Phrase and Intonation Phrase domains are necessary within the hierarchy of prosodic constituents in Chichewa. The authors reference key phonetic research by Downing & Pompino-Marschall (Reference Downing and Pompino-Marschall2013), which shows a pattern of cumulative penultimate lengthening, evidence the authors argue supports a pattern of recursive Intonation Phrase structures, instead of separate Phonological Phrase and Intonation Phrase units.

Chapter 11, the final chapter of the book, describes intonation patterns in three constructions in Chichewa (declarative sentences, content/wh-questions and polar questions), based on a combination of impressionistic and instrumental acoustic studies. For declarative sentences (§11.1), the authors describe downstep, which occurs when two high tone syllables are separated by a toneless syllable, ‘continuation rise’, which they analyse as occurring prior to an Intonation Phrase break, and final lowering. The main acoustic correlate of content questions is an overall raised F0 of the utterance (§11.2); for polar questions, a special intonational pattern is realised across the final two syllables of an utterance (§11.3). The authors also describe how differences in the status of the subject – e.g. whether the subject is a topic vs. a focused constituent – may or may not correlate with a continuation rise following the subject. In §11.4, the authors conclude with a short description of ‘emphasis prosody’, or changes in pitch register of a word and pitch range for the utterance which may occur when a particular word is in focus.