Between tone and stress in Hamar

This paper provides a preliminary description of the word-prosodic system of
Hamar, a South Omotic language spoken in South West Ethiopia. The prosodic
system of Hamar shows properties of both stress accent and tone: accent is lexi-
cally contrastive in nouns, but not in verbs, where it has a grammatical function.
Post-lexical tonal oppositions arise when lexical accent and grammatical accent in-
teract in both nouns and verbs. The prosodic behaviour of Hamar nouns and verbs
is in line with the pattern proposed by Smith (2011), whereby nouns are higher than
verbs in a hierarchy of phonological privilege.