The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of “zeroing out” a tone in the above sense: When is an opposition properly analyzed as the presence vs. absence of a tone, rather than two different indications of tone, e.g. a + vs. of a tone feature?1 Although phonetic pitch (Fo) is scalar in nature, phonological (categorical) tone frequently has a privative character. The most frequent situat...

SYNOPSIS Twenty-seven specimens of human tissue, obtained by operation, were tested to evaluate the theory that iron uptake by tissues from serum is greater when transferrin is nearly completely saturated than when the degree of saturation is normal. Samples of each tissue were incubated in autologous serum so prepared that in one instance the transferrin was 50% saturated and in the second 90%...

The article investigates the realization of adjacent high tones across word boundaries in Tswana, a Southern Bantu language. The results show that downstep, a lowering of the second in a series of adjacent high tones, takes place across word boundaries within the same phonological phrase. Downstep does not occur across phonological phrase boundaries. The study confirms an empirical phenomenon a...

Much is already known about the prosodic systems of the indigenous South African languages from descriptions and analyses in the existing literature. All of the existing work has been carried out in the field of African studies or formal linguistics. In order to be able to implement the generalisations obtained into computational models in speech processing, the existing sources and results mus...

Locative inversion (LI) is a construction that is very prominent in Bantu languages. It involves inversion of a locative with the logical ⁄ thematic subject. The inversion is accompanied by a reversal of grammatical functions whereby the locative becomes the subject. LI is associated with a special discourse function, that of presentational focus. Within Bantu there is quite some variation, esp...

When two nominal constituents are in a relation of dependency in the Bantu languages, the syntactically dependent constituent is usually introduced by a relator. In Bantu studies this relator is called connective (also associative, genitive or connexive) element (or pronoun, clitic, prefix, marker or particle). The order is HEAD (R1) RELATOR (REL) DEPENDENT (R2). R1 and R2 are short for first a...

Major metabolic effects of human growth hormone (HGH) were assessed in the African Babinga pygmy. Plasma free fatty acid (FFA) and glucose concentrations were measured in pygmies, HGH-deficient dwarfs, Bantu tribesmen, and Caucasian controls after each received 4 mg of HGH intravenously over a 20 min period. Pygmies had an early decrease of plasma FFA and glucose concentration, but did not exhi...

Interindividual variation of human mitochondrial DNA has been extensively studied over the last two decades, and its usefulness for reconstructing evolutionary relationships of extant populations has been proved. However, some mitochondrial lineages still need to be studied using a combination of larger and tailored datasets and increased level of resolution in order to shed light on their orig...