Strategies of emphasis and intensity in Swahili

Swahili is the lingua franca of more than a hundred and twenty million speakers in eastern Africa. It functions as their working language, school language, church and mosque language, market language etc, but only a few million eastern Africans are traditional native speakers of Swahili, and most of them have a Muslim background. There is little documentation on strategies of emphasis, intensity or amplifying in Swahili. Ashton (1944:316-8) describes reduplication in a short section which is briefly repeated in almost all Swahili grammars compiled since then, occasionally mentioning emphasis as one of the functions of reduplication, besides showing intensity, distributiveness, etc. Aspiration is seldom mentioned in Swahili grammars or course books. The few previous studies of the phenomenon of aspiration in Swahili (Panconcelli-Calzia 1911; Tucker and Ashton 1942; Polome 1967:38-49; Engstrand & Lodhi 1984, 1985a, 1985b) deal mainly with the occurence of aspiration in nouns of classes 9 and 10 which have lost their initial N-prefix preceding the unvoiced/voiceless /p , t , k , t /, and measurements of Voice Onset Time (VOT). The occurence of aspiration (or explosion) in adjectives and verbs, and syllabuses other than the initial ones in nouns of various classes, has not been treated satisfactorily either in any previous study, ie. as it is evidenced in nyumb a ‘house’, t und u ‘small hole’, mtund u ‘mischievous’, kit and a