Prosody and the conjoint disjoint alternation in Tshivenḓa

Tshivenḓa (Guthrie S21) shares with other Southern Bantu languages a distinctive alternation in the form of the verb, termed the conjoint\slash disjoint alternation. I will present data from original fieldwork showing that, in contrast to other related languages, the Tshivenḓa conjoint and disjoint forms are not in complementary distribution by syntactic context, and instead show a distinctive three-way split in acceptability. I will also show that the same three-way split obtains in the frequency of utterance-internal penultimate lengthening. I discuss two possible analyses of this correlation, one in which the disjoint is a purely prosodic phenomenon and one in which the correlation is due to the influence of some third factor such as information structure.