Qhalaxari verb tone classes

3. SUMMARY

This paper has been an attempt to show the historical development of the Qhalaxari verb tone classes. Its findings may be summarized as follows:

	(i) CB and Qhalaxari tone is autosegmental. This was shown by the fact that CB ∗CV radicals retain their tones in Qhalaxari even though the original tone‐bearing vowel had been desyllabified or deleted.
	(ii) Double‐vowel and single‐vowel radicals have merged to single‐vowel radicals only. This was possibly due to what must have been the disruptive effect of penultimate prepausal lengthening on the original double versus single vowel distinction.
	(iii) CB tone classes ∗L and ∗LL have merged completely due to the loss of double‐vowel radicals and the masking effect of toneless low assignment on the tone attachment of the second L of original ∗LL radicals.
	(iv) The Qhalaxari HIGH‐2 tone class comes from the CB single ∗H class. The second high tone in the Qhalaxari forms is regarded as the effect of high spread, which also affects the high tone on subject, object and tense/mood prefixes in a similar way. High spread, with variations, was also found in verb stems in Tsonga, Venda and Tswana. (v) It was found that the CB ∗HH tone class reconstructed by Guthrie (1967–71) could not account satisfactorily for the Qhalaxari HIGH‐1 tone class. The loss of the second high tone due to the collapse of the double/single vowel distinction was unexpected in an autosegmental system. Positing a different reconstruction, namely ∗HL, solved this problem. There was now no second high tone to be lost, and the second, low, tone would simply be placed on the tense suffix or extension following the radical.
	(vi) The fact that Qhalaxari has three, but Tsonga, Venda and Tswana have two tone classes, was attributed to maintaining the marking in Qhalaxari of original ∗HL (Guthrie's ∗HH) radicals as exceptions to the high spread rule when the double/single vowel distinction collapsed, but allowing these radicals to fall within the scope of this rule in other languages.