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with the pattern for nouns. However, I have found no independent evidence that the
glottal stop in these positions is inserted.
Because of the presence of the infinitive prefix, verbal citation forms are at a
minimum bisyllabic. As a result, the MC is met for verbs and thus SRA does not apply.
As with nouns, the shorter verbal word shapes are the most widely attested. The
majority of Mono verb roots consist of (a) a single syllable, or (b) two syllables in which
the second syllable contains a liquid followed by a vowel identical to the vowel in the
first syllable:
(13) Mono bisyllabic CV1LV1 verb roots
CAH CAH CAH CAH ‘grow’
H H H H ‘quarrel’
> > > > ‘incite’
B=H= B=H= ‘deceive’
CH CH CH CH ‘drive away, chase’
CKHK CKHK ‘fade’
@H @H @H @H ‘suck’
>H >H >H >H ‘do’
When both tones of the verb root are Low, the first vowel is optionally shortened
or elided. Thus, (>H (>H (>H (>H ~ (>'H (>'H (>'H (>'H ~ (>H (>H (>H (>H ‘to do’. However, in forms where the
two vowels have different tones, the reduction is not possible. For example,
>(H >(H >(H >(H ‘do:NF’ cannot be reduced.
6.3 Adverbial word shapes
Documenting the word shapes of Mono adverbs is problematic, for a couple of
reasons. First, as Payne (1997: 69) points out, the category “adverb” is often treated as a
“catch-all” category, including words which cannot easily be categorized as nouns, verbs
or adjectives. Often the category adverb includes words referring to manner, time, and
location. Second, Mono contains a large number of ideophones 5 (Welmers 1973, Childs
5
Ideophones are sometimes referred to as expressives (see, e.g., Diffloth 1994). In the Africanist
literature, however, the term “ideophone” is more current.
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