Tumbuka prosody: Between tone and stress

Tumbuka is spoken in the northern Lake Malawi region where it is typical for Bantu
languages to have what has been called a restricted tone system: all words must
have a High tone. This kind of prosodic system has stress-like properties, and func-
tions similar to Kisseberth & Odden (2003). Vail (1972) suggests that Tumbuka is a
purely stress language. This paper argues, in contrast, that because Tumbuka High
tone realization has tone-like properties, as defined in Hyman (2006; 2009; 2012;
2014), as well as stress-like properties, it cannot be considered a canonical stress
language. It is proposed that the synchronic Tumbuka prosodic system evolved
from one where contrastive High tone takes a phrasal domain through processes
– formalizable as an OT factorial typology – which made phrasal prosody more
transparently predictable by eliminating most tonal contrasts.