Town Nyanja verbal tonology

This paper describes and analyzes the verbal tonology of Town Nyanja, spoken inLusaka, Zambia. While closely related to Malawian Chichewa and Eastern ProvinceNyanja, Town Nyanja is shown to be critically different in several respects. First,unlike Chichewa, which still exhibits a tone contrast in verb roots, Town Nyanjahas lost that underlying contrast. Second, while Chichewa is one of the Bantu lan-guages which has some High-toned verbal extensions, Town Nyanja does not. Finally, it is shown that tonologically all verbs fall into three patterns, dictated bytwo factors: 1) the tense/aspect/mood/polarity (tamP), and 2) the presence (or absence) of an object marker. Depending on those two factors, a verb ends up witheither one or two High tones in the macrostem. A melodic High tone is present ineach verb, and all object markers have a floating H. It is shown that there are only3 possible docking sites for these floating Hs: 1) the macrostem-initial tbu, 2) thestem-initial tbu, and 3) the penult. The tamP determines whether there is one ortwo docking sites for the floating tone(s) present. Where two sites are designated,it is shown that these need to be ranked or prioritized to account for the complexarray of surface tones.