Prosodic phonology in Nata

This dissertation describes primary data illustrating phonological alternations in Nata, a Lacustrine Bantu language spoken in the Mara region of Tanzania. The data presented in this work was elicited from native speakers of Nata, both in Canada, and in Tanzania. The primary focus of the dissertation is in describing and analyzing patterns of tone and vowel harmony in nominal forms. These particular phenomena were chosen because they are bounded by prosodic domains. I propose that these types of phonological patterns can be analyzed in an emergent framework, Lexical Allomorphy (Archangeli & Pulleyblank, 2015, 2016, 2017). This framework allows for phonotactic restrictions that apply globally in the phonological grammar, but also morpheme specific conditions which characterize the distribution of particular sounds with respect to that morpheme. Throughout the dissertation I demonstrate that such a framework is sufficient to account for a variety of forms.