Tone in Pichi

The Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creole Pichi (Equatorial Guinea) is a tone language. Pichi has two phonological tones, a level H and a level L tone. The language features numerous monosyllabic tonal minimal pairs, for example, dé /H/ ‘locative-existential copula’ vs. dè /L/ ‘imperfective marker’, and wét /H/ ‘wait’ vs. wèt /L/ ‘with’. It also shows the maximal number of possible tone patterns over bisyllabic words of the same syntactic category, for example, fíbà /HL/ ‘fever’, wàtá /LH/ ‘water’, nyɔ́ní /HH/ ‘ant’, and jɔ̀mbà /LL/ ‘lover’. Grammatical tone is used for the inflection of personal pronouns for case and in compounding. Tone patterns over words are unevenly distributed. Most English-derived words, which constitute the majority of lexemes, bear at least and not more than one H, and the position of the H tone largely coincides with primary stress placement in the cognate forms of English. Polysyllabic lexemes with more than one H or no H at all are fewer and are generally found in words with an African etymology, as in nyɔ́ní /HH/ ‘ant’ above, derived from Mende ‘red ant’. Pichi also has a number of tonal processes, including rightward H-tone spreading, tone sandhi and deletion, and a tone-conditioned suppletive allomorphy. Intonational boundary tones expressing pragmatic functions like clausal focus and emphasis or yes/no questions exclusively occur over the utterance-final syllable. Pichi features utterance-level downstep, which means that every H tone is lower than a preceding one within the same utterance.