SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This thesis is in two parts. Part I is a phonetic study of the sounds of the Karanga dialect of Shona, prefaced by a review of some of the major works on Shona phonetics. The review, written from the point of view of current scientific theory, isolates those areas of the subject in which the present author hopes to make a contribution. In order to bring some order to the analysis and classification of the sounds of the dialect, a brief outline of the phoneme theory as set out by the post- Bloomfieldians is given in the first chapter. The review is thus set against the background of that theory and it is argued that the work of Doke (1931) and Fortune (1955, 1968) would have benefitted if it had been conducted within the framework of an explicit theory such as that propounded by the American structuralist phonemicists. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 are a phonetic study of the sounds of Karanga: the distinctive segments of the dialect are grouped into classes using articulatory criteria. Then each class is described with a view to pin-pointing some of the outstanding acoustic features which characterise it and such features are compared with those reported for the sounds of other languages in articles and books by other phoneticians. The outstanding phonetic features described in Part I are used as the basis for an inventory of distinctive features used in Part II. In the latter part, in 1. All the instrumental material is contained in Vol. II of the thesis. particular in Chapter 7, the distinction between phonology and grammar has become very narrow indeed. That Chapter (Chapter 6 is on segmental phonological processes) is on the tonal processes caused by the affixation of certain grammatical prefixes on to nominal stems, e.g. what have been called the prefixes of "association" and "similarity", /na-/, "with" or "in the company of..", and /sa-/, "like" or "resembling", respectively. The nouns of Shona fall into a number of classes each of which is made up of items with a variety of tone patterns. The study reported in that chapter is interesting in that the rules which one can posit to account for these tonal processes are, to a large extent, similar, in spite of the fact that the prefixes perform diverse grammatical functions.