Tone and morphological level ordering in Dagaare

Abstract

Dagaare is a language of northern Ghana and adjoining areas of Burkina Faso. There are two tones, H and L, and contrastive downstep H!H that involves a non-automatic pitch drop between two H tones. The challenge is to explain the extensive morphological conditioning of tonal processes, including dissimilation, downstep and spreading. Our solution involves level ordering: tones are introduced at different morphological levels (stems, words and phrases) and later processes can make earlier processes opaque. Tonal differences between nouns (spreading) versus verbs (no spreading) and stems (dissimilation) versus words (downstep) arise from constraint ranking differences within and across levels. There are two kinds of downsteps: stem-level downsteps are underlying L tones affiliated with some morpheme; word-level downsteps are L tones inserted by a general process of word-final lowering. Only one downstep per word is allowed. If more would arise, the morphologically inner downstep blocks the morphologically outer downstep.