Nominal and Verbal Tone in Nata

This chapter examines core tonal properties of Nata, a Lacustrine Bantu language (Guthrie E-45) spoken in the Mara region of Tanzania. In most instances, both in nouns and verbs, a Nata word exhibits a single high tone, which is restricted to a small number of locations. Though Nata’s tone system might appear simple, close examination of nouns and verbs uncovers considerable complexity in the system. Nouns exhibit lexically encoded distinctions; verb roots exhibit no lexical distinctions, but inflected verbs differ tonally depending on tense/aspect/mood. The sparse distribution of high tones follows from simple edge effects whereby tones are located relative to well-motivated morphosyntactic boundaries. The analysis, framed in a lexical allomorphy approach, crucially depends on correct identification of the macrostem, with a novel aspect being the extension of the macrostem to nouns. This extension is adopted on the grounds that nouns and verbs share similar surface patterns, captured by reference to a common domain.