Adjective Reduplication and Tone Assignment in Ejagham

Abstract

African languages are endowed with a plethora of linguistic processes which speakers employ to convey meaning in utterances. Among these processes is one in which some strings of a word may be repeated to provide particular meaning to the word in a process known as “reduplication” (Mutaka & Tamanji, 2000). This process is found to be productive in Ejagham—one of the languages spoken in Manyu Division south west Region of Cameroon. In this language, nouns, verbs and adjectives undergo partial or complete reduplication that either give different notions or lead to meaning that roughly translates a general concept. Nouns, for example, give the notion of “abundance”. Verbs are reduplicated to give the meaning of what might toughly be translated as “ Just + action”, while reduplicated adjectives mostly serve as intensifiers. Drawing from Marantz’s (1982) model of reduplicative template analyses, this paper presents a phonological analysis of the segments and tones of reduplicative adjectives. The analysis, in most cases, reveals that the reduplicant could be partial or complete and that the base retains its basic tone which sometimes becomes modified on the reduplicant.