Problems in Kuria H tone assignment
In the Buguumbe dialect of Kuria, the assignment of inflectional H tones to the verb poses at least two theoretically significant problems. First, the principles of tone assignment count to four and are not amenable to a metrical analysis, which is problematic for theories of locality. Second, for at least some speakers, the principles of tone assignment are phrase-level processes that refer to the internal structure of the verbal word, which is problematic for the notion of Bracket Erasure within Lexical Phonology.
tone counting lexical phonology bantu prosodic domains