ABSTRACT
In the telling of the story, there are quite often repetitive actions described, e.g. 'They talked and talked', 'He waited and waited', 'The donkey went trit-trot, trit-trot, trit-trot, all the way home', 'He chopped and chopped, chopped and chopped', 'She filled the room, filled the room (with gold)'. In these cases, the story-teller often uses what I would analyse as a modified form of tone-group, with the tonic spread over more than one word, whereas normally it occurs on only one item (neutrally the last in the tone-group). So in tone-group A (Fall) the tonic is neutrally a fall on the penultimate (or stressed) syllable, all following syllables low. But in these examples the tonic seems to start on the first stressed syllable and to spread out to the penultimate. With A * the shape is e.g.:
.. ----- .' ----84. A * akajaza chum bani ] A * akajaza chumbani ] (92) 'she filled the room and filled the room'
waliongea] waliongea]
akajaza chumbani ] akajaza chumbani ] Note that in example 83 the A * tone-group is spread over what would neutrally be two A tone-groups.
