About the Harmony Disposition of Lelemi Affixes

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to give further insight into the vowel harmonizing properties of Lelemi affixes as it has well-known for 40 years that "very many of the Kwa languages (...) have vowel harmony of (...) the CROSS-HEIGHT type" (Stewart 1971:198) which is based on the feature of tongue root advancing, while details for individual languages are often missing. The account given here just represents a minor revision of former analyses that however helps to understand some peculiarities in the language and that affects the representation of nominal and verbal prefixes which might be needed for language-external comparison.