Tone and Accent in the Igbo Verb

The goal of this article is to give an account of the accentual properties of some aspects of the Igbo verb tone system. (Most of the examples are taken from Central Igbo.) The data presented here show that the Igbo verbal system exhibits characteristics somewhat similar to the types encountered in and already analyzed for Bantu languages and Japanese, respectively (cf., for instance Bickmore, Downing this volume, Jouannet 1989, Haraguchi 1991, Yoshida 1996, 1999). This implies that the Igbo verbal system might be considered as a mix of tone-stress and pitch-accent systems.