Tones and intonation in Gizey

Abstract

This paper investigates the role of intonation in Gizey, a tonal language classified as a Chadic language - one of the four families of the Afro-Asiatic phylum (Ajello & Karyo & Melis & Dobio 2001; De Dominicis 2007; Melis 1999, 2002, 2007). Gizey belongs to the Biu- Mandara or the Masa cluster, which includes two branches: Masa (Masa, Gizey) and Musey (Musey, Ham, Marba-Lew, Monogoy). According to Seignobos’s census (Seignobos & Iyebi-Mandjek 2000), Gizey is spoken in the south of Chad and in the north of Cameroon by about 12,000 speakers. It has not been described yet and it is not included in the Ethnologue archive (Grimes & Grimes 1996). In the present study, a dialogue (recorded on January 7, 2004) between two native speakers (both males, 20 years of age) living in Djougoumta – a little village in the North-East of Cameroon – has been analysed. Their conversation concerns local methods of building houses. As a tonal language, Gizey should attribute to F0 dynamics the expression of both lexical tones and sentence intonation contour. But many contexts show a more complex tonal perturbation, in which the surface realisation is the expression of underlying syntactic functions and relations. Just as words sequences instantiate or repeat a given syntactic scheme and thus can be analysed in a grid, certain perturbation patterns mark their membership to the same syntactic function, sometimes even beyond the intonation phrase boundaries. In other words, in these cases, the similarity of the perturbation mechanisms establishes and endorses the syntax-intonation interface: at the surface level, the affected constituents mark the underlying identity of their syntactic function.