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Lexical and post-lexical tones in Akan Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Doctor philosophiae (Dr.phil.) an der Humanwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Universität Potsdam eingereicht von Susanne Genzel Februar 2013 Published online at the Institutional Repository of the University of Potsdam: URN urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-77969 http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-77969 In memory of my aunt, Sabine Genzel. Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to express my very great appreciation to my supervisors, Caroline Féry and Frank Kügler. I am especially grateful to Frank. He hired me as a student assistant in summer 2003 and let me take part in many interesting empirical investigations. Later on, in November 2007, he employed me in the project D5 on “Tonal structure and information structure: Phonetics & Phonology”, which is part of the wonderful collaborative research centre on information structure (SFB 632), financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Akan is one of the languages we are investigating in our project. Frank did a great job as supervisor. He was very interested and encouraging and always had time for me to discuss new ideas. Caroline was my Prof. in linguistics when I studied at University of Potsdam. Her seminar “Intonation im typologischen Vergleich”, held in winter 2004/2005, impressed me and made me curious for intonation/prosody and typology. Caroline’s comments were very helpful and improved the thesis immensely. Discussing with her was really inspiring. My special thanks are extended to all participants and informants. “Mo boaa me paa. Medaase!” Especially, I would like to mention Afua Blay, Reginald Duah, Benjamin Bamfo and Monica Apenten, who made me feel at home in Ghana and were always willing to share their native speaker intuitions with me. Without you, I could not have written the thesis. Further, I would like to thank Akua Appiah-Akuramaa who was my ‘Berlin’ informant. Further, I am very grateful to Dr. K. Dovlo who very kindly welcomed me to the University of Ghana (Legon), arranged my first talk in front of a native speaker audience and provided me with everything I needed. I also wish to acknowledge the help provided by Prof. Dr. K. Saah and Nana Ama Agyeman. Additionally, I would like to thank Dr. C. Marfo, working at the University of Kumasi (KNUST), for discussing phrasing related and other Akan specific issues with me and for drawing my attention to the conference of the Linguistics Association of Ghana in Winneba (2012). I have talked to many people during the thesis writing process. First of all, I would like to mention Sabine Zerbian. Since she had her office very close to mine, I went there very often to ask tone language related questions. She always had time for me and also read an early version and provided very helpful comments. Further, I am grateful to Ruben van de Vijver who also gave very useful advices and made me laugh. I would also like to mention Anja Arnhold, Sandra Beyermann, Laura Downing, Ines Fiedler, Anja Gollrad, Markus Greif, Mira Grubic, Robin Hörnig, Shinishiro Ishihara, Sara Myrberg, Annie Rialland, Bernadett Smolibocki and Thomas Westkott…. i Finally, I wish to thank my family, Mama, Oma, Onkelchen, Marie und Hannah for their unconditional love and support. Further, I am grateful to all my friends for their patience, for calling me, writing me, cooking for me, giving massages and providing plenty of other sorts of support. Last but not least, I want to thank Himanshu, for keeping the household running, for his irrepressible high spirits, patience, support and goodies. ii List of abbreviations and symbols ATR advanced tongue root BT breathy termination C consonant 1 COMP complementizer CP complementizer phrase db decibel DD downdrift DEF definite ∆ difference/drop DIM diminutive DET determiner DP determiner phrase DS downstep F focus F formant F0 fundamental frequency fin final FM focus marker h high register tone H high tone HAB habitual Hz Hertz IMP imperative InflP inflectional phrase Int intensity Intrel relative intensity IP/ι intonation phrase l low register tone L low tone LPC linear predictive coding M mid tone max maximal ms millisecond μ mora NEG negative NOM nominal NP nominal phrase NSF non-subject focus OPT optative PL plural pMCMC p-value calculated from MONTE CARLO sampling by Markov chain pP/φ phonological phrase PART particle Φ foot PoD position of the pitch drop PRF perfective PRO pronoun 1 The abbreviations in small capitals basically follow the convention of the Leipzig Glossing Rules (Bickel, Comrie & Haspelmath, 2004). iii PROG progressive Psg subglottal air pressure PST past pw/ω prosodic word r baseline value R2 coefficient of determination RTR retracted tongue root σ syllable s downdrift quotient sec second SF subject focus SG singular st semitone SPEC specific SVO subject, verb, object T tone T terminal T* pitch accent T! downstepped tone T floating tone T% boundary tone TBU tone bearing unit TM topic marker TW target word U utterance V verb V vowel VP verbal phrase x beat X0 lexical word XP maximal projection ♀ female ♂ male local lowering local raising ↑ global raising iv Contents Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………....i List of abbreviations and symbols…………………………………………………………… iii About the book ........................................................................................................................... 1 1. Chapter General and theoretical background ..................................................................... 7 1.1 General introduction to Akan ...................................................................................... 8 1.2 Phonological representation of tone .......................................................................... 12 1.3 Tone terracing ............................................................................................................ 17 1.4 Prosodic structure ...................................................................................................... 25 1.4.1 The prosodic organization of constituents ......................................................... 25 1.4.2 Prosodic constituents and their phonetic properties ........................................... 26 1.5 Tonal and non-tonal intonation .................................................................................. 40 1.5.1 What is intonation? ............................................................................................. 40 1.5.2 Sentence type ...................................................................................................... 42 1.5.3 Focus .................................................................................................................. 45 1.6 Universal intonational meaning ................................................................................. 51 1.6.1 The Production code ........................................................................................... 51 1.6.2 The Frequency code ........................................................................................... 53 1.6.3 The Effort code ................................................................................................... 54 1.7 Phonetic implementation ........................................................................................... 55 1.8 Tonal variations in connected speech ........................................................................ 58 1.9 Summary of the main research questions .................................................................. 60 2. Chapter Material and methods ......................................................................................... 62 2.1 The participants ......................................................................................................... 62 2.2 The corpus ................................................................................................................. 63 2.3 Recording procedure .................................................................................................. 70 2.4 Data pre-processing and statistical analysis .............................................................. 71 3. Chapter The influence of adjacent tones in connected speech ......................................... 73 3.1 L raising ..................................................................................................................... 73 3.2 H raising .................................................................................................................... 81 4. Chapter Downtrends ......................................................................................................... 92 4.1 Types of downstep ..................................................................................................... 93 4.2 Downstep in initial position ..................................................................................... 100 4.3 Declination and downstep ....................................................................................... 107 4.3.1 Declination ....................................................................................................... 107 4.3.2 The implementation of declination .................................................................. 119 4.3.3 Downstep .......................................................................................................... 124 4.3.4 The implementation of downstep ....................................................................
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