A preliminary analysis of East Kewa Tone

This paper provides a preliminary analysis of the tone system in East Kewa. The domain of tone in East Kewa is the morpheme, but like other New Guinea Highlands languages tone sandhi applies such that the tone of each morpheme affects the tone of the following morpheme. Like languages elsewhere in the world, East Kewa nouns display a larger paradigm of tone choices than do its verb roots. Verb words, however, are made up of a verb root and a desinence, each with their own tone, and the combination of the two tones brings complications of its own.