Earticle

Xitsonga nouns display two types of plural formation. Plural prefixes can be added to a singular root (prefixation), or plural prefixes can take the place of singular prefixes (substitution). Tonal realizations differ in these two types, as the prefixation plurals show tonal polarity whereas the substitution plurals show paradigm uniformity effects in the absence of tonal polarity. The Xitsonga data differ from previous studies of tonal polarity in that the presence or absence of tonal polarity can target the same class of nouns that differ only in terms of how plurals are formed. A constraint-based analysis shows that the paradigm uniformity constraint (IDENT-BO-T) outranks the OCP constraint, which in turn outranks the general tonal identity constraint (IDENT-T).