Tone-groups and clause structure in Swahili

Extract

In a recent (and as yet unpublished) study of Swahili intonation (John Kelly and Joan Maw) it was pointed out that the neutral situation vis-à-vis grammar is to have one tone-group corresponding to one clause (except under certain predictable conditions), and within the tone-group to have two points of reference, named the ‘salient’ and the ‘tonic’, whose neutral positions (again except in certain predictable cases) are respectively on the first lexical item and on the last item in the clause. Any other arrangement constitutes ‘special’ intonation. Amongst other conclusions, it was tentatively hypothesized that special intonation of the multiple tone-group type seemed to correlate with marked clause structure. Marked clause structure, as defined in Maw, Sentences in Swahili, London, 1969, designated clauses with marked sequence of elements of structure, such as the Subject following the Predicator, the Complement preceding the Predicator, the Subject and Predicator separated by an Adjunct, and so on (the neutral situation being generally the sequence (A)SPC(A)); and also discontinuous clauses. The hypothesis that multiple tone-groups and marked clause structure might show correlation could only be tentative, because in the passages used for the Kelly and Maw study marked clause structure was not particularly frequent. But in the most varied text there were 36 clauses with marked sequence of elements, of which 28 had multiple tone-groups. Moreover there were only 37 clauses with multiple tone-groups in all in that text. This particular point about possible correlation was, of course, only a minor suggestion in a general description, but it seemed worth looking into more closely.