DOCSLIB.ORG

Phrasing, Register Level Downstep and Partial Topic Constructions in Neapolitan Italian

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Phrasing, Register Level Downstep and Partial Topic Constructions in Neapolitan Italian Phrasing, register level downstep and partial topic constructions in Neapolitan Italian Mariapaola D’Imperio and Francesco Cangemi In this paper, we analyze data from Neapolitan Italian showing that register level downstep across prosodic phrases can be a function of information structure and specific discourse strategies. Specifically, we hypothesized that in NP VP sentences, Partial (and thus contrastive) Topic NP phrases are followed by a phrase break and by a downstepped register level in the VP phrase, while this is not true in non-contrastive constructions. We also show that this type of register level downstep is not to be confused with the extreme register compression effect caused by early, contrastive focus (on the sentence-initial NP), though both Partial Topic and Contrastive Focus on a Subject NP appear to induce a phrase break between the NP and the VP phrase. Keywords : partial topic, contrastive focus, preboundary lengthening, register level downstep, Neapolitan Italian. 1. Introduction Within the Autosegmental-Metrical theory, pitch accents are predicted to be scaled relatively lower when later within an intermediate phrase, by virtue of either downstep or final lowering (Liberman and Pierrehumbert 1984). Downstep is predicted to be blocked across phrases, since (complete) pitch reset is observed after an intermediate phrase boundary. However, Ladd (1988) noted that partial reset can be observed in English for certain syntactic constructions, and hence proposed to model this effect as downstep of abstract register features across larger domains (such as two successive intermediate phrases within an intonation phrase). More recently, Truckenbrodt and colleagues (Truckenbrodt 2002; Féry and Truckenbrodt 2005) have emphasized the relevance of prosodic constituency in the dowstepping of register levels in German, by claiming that pitch accent values are merely relational and that the level of prosodic embedding determines the height of the peak. Register level downstep across phrases can also explain partial reset on non initial prosodic phrases, so that phrase- internal downstep would be calculated relative to the reference line set for the specific phrase (see Fig. 1 for a schematic representation of the phenomenon). Fig. 1 Schematic representation of phrase internal and phrase external or register downstep, from Féry and Truckenbrodt (2005). Previous work on Germanic languages has hence underlined the role of syntax in determining the level of prosodic embedding. In this paper, we analyze data from Neapolitan Italian showing that register level lowering across prosodic phrases can also be a function of information structure. Specifically, we hypothesized that in an NP VP structure, the register level of the VP phrase would be lowered when coextensive with a focus constituent immediately following a Partial Topic phrase. In other words, we test whether, independent of surface syntactic structure, register downstep (as modeled in previous work, such as by Féry and Truckenbrodt) could be merely due to differences in the information structure of the utterance, that is the Topic/Focus partitioning, as well as by the contrastive/non contrastive nature of Topic and Focus. Note that in Neapolitan Italian it appears that information topics are not always separated from the rest of the utterance by a phrase break (cf. D’Imperio et al. 2008a), which we further test here. We also show here that register level lowering is not to be confused with the extreme register compression effect caused by contrastive narrow focus on the Subject NP. Note though that in Neapolitan Italian, a prosodic break can also appear after an NP when this is syntactically or prosodically branching (D’Imperio et al. 2005, Frota et al. 2007). In that case, though, the edge tone is usually high or rising (H-), while this is not the case for Contrastive Topic and Narrow Focus phrases (which show respectively a !H- and a L- at their right edge, see §1.3 below). We employ here Büring’s (1997) notion of Partial Topic (PT), in which the sentence topic is used to ‘narrow down’ a given discourse topic represented by an implicit or explicit question, hence offering a partial (non- exhaustive) answer. An example can be found in (1): (1) a. Da dove venivano i tuoi amici? ‘Where did your friends come from?’ b. [Marina] NP/PT [veniva da Roma] VP ‘(As for) Marina, (she) came from Rome’ Here (1b) offers only a partial answer to the question, in that it predicates something about one member of the set (in other words, as for Marina I know something of, but as for the others, I do not know). But before we discuss information structure theory and its relation with prosodic structure, we shall summarize some findings on syntax based phrasing in Neapolitan Italian. 1.1 Syntax and phrasing A considerable number of studies have shown that the placement of intonational boundaries in various languages can be affected by non- syntactic levels of grammar, such as information structure, prosodic constraints (such as prosodic weight and balance) and speech rate, which all seem to play a major role in phrasing decisions (Nespor and Vogel 1986, Ghini 1993, Steedman 1991, Oliva 1992, Truckenbrodt 1999, Selkirk 2000, among many others). Moreover, some studies have pointed out language- specific preferences in prosodic groupings. Previous comparative work on intonational phrasing in Romance languages (Elordieta et al. 2003; D’Imperio et al. 2005, Frota et al. 2007) has focused on the role of both syntactic and prosodic factors on the placement of intonational boundaries in broad focus SVO declarative sentences in a number of Romance languages (Northern and European Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan and Neapolitan Italian). Specifically, the effect of syntactic branching (i.e. constituency), prosodic branching (i.e. number of prosodic words), and length (i.e. number of syllables) was examined in a systematic way by first perceptually defining phrasing occurrence (as well as tonally transcribing pitch accent and boundary type) and then performing a number of acoustic measures (such as preboundary lengthening, pitch reset, etc.). However, information structure effects, in absence of syntactic or prosodic differences, had not been previously studied. Among the findings, while in Catalan, syntactic and eurhythmic constraints conspire to produce SVO utterances as two phrases, with a break after the subject or even after the verb (when the object is long), Southern European Portuguese and Neapolitan Italian usually group SVO utterances into a single intonational phrase and only allow for an optional break after S if this is prosodically branching. However, while Subject length in terms of numbers of syllables does not seem to affect phrasing in Neapolitan Italian (see Fig. 2), it matters for Southern European Portuguese since only long branching subjects trigger the presence of a phrase break, not short ones. In Spanish, like in Catalan, the most common phrasing appears to be (S)(VO). However, in contrast with the other Romance languages considered, syntactic branching (and not prosodic length) seems to be a major factor in phrasing decisions in Spanish. It was also found that Romance languages appear to mark prosodic breaks with a high boundary edge tone or, as in the case of Italian, by sustained pitch (marked by the presence of a H- phrase accent), that is a local rise on the accented syllable followed by a high and flat F0 contour continuing until the end of the phrase. Fig. 2 F0 curve and waveform for the broad focus statement La boliviana mirava la serenata di Maddalena ‘The Bolivian woman looked at Maddalena’s serenade’, uttered as a single prosodic phrase by a speaker of Neapolitan Italian (taken from D’Imperio et al. 2005). In this paper, we show evidence for the existence of a mid level phrase accent (!H-) marking the right edge of a Subject phrase in specific Topic constructions, as well as widespread use of L- for marking the right edge of a narrow focus constituent (for narrow contrastive focus effects, cf. D’Imperio, 2001, 2002). Moreover, when pitch reset was also measured after the phrase break, it was found that Spanish and Italian tend to show more pitch reset (though partial) than the other Romance languages. This and other findings point to the existence of strong language preferences for boundary placement, which are not simply derived through universal syntactic constraints. Some of these constraints have been shown to be prosodic in nature and some of them have also recently been formalized within an Optimality theoretical framework (Prieto 2005, Feldhausen to appear). For instance, Prieto has proposed the existence of a constraint Max-Bin-End in Catalan, stating that prosodic phrases containing the main stress of the utterance (hence the phrase at the end of the Intonation Phrase, which explains the name of the constraint proposed) consist of maximally two prosodic words. Hence, the predicted phrasing pattern in La bimba mirava | la serenata meravellosa ‘The girl admired the marvelous serenade’ is one in which the break is after the verb, and not after the Subject NP, since la serenata meravellosa is composed of two minor prosodic phrases. It is this constraint, then, that would then be responsible for placing a phrase break after V within a VP when the Object phrase is long. More recently, the body of work on Romance languages has been increased through work on French (D'Imperio et al. 2008b, D'Imperio and Michelas 2010, Michelas and D'Imperio 2010a, 2010b), where additional evidence for the existence of an intermediate level of phrasing has been found. In this language, intermediate phrases appear to be mainly syntactically driven, in that they tend to occur at the right edge of a maximal projection when the prosodic structure allows it. 1.2 Discourse structure and phrasing It is a well-known fact that intonational patterns can influence and are, in turn, affected by pragmatic (Bolinger 1965, Halliday 1967, Jackendoff 1972, Lambrecht 1994, Ladd 1980) and semantic (Féry 1993, Büring 1997, among others) interpretation in several languages.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Downstep and Recursive Phonological Phrases in Bàsàá (Bantu A43) Fatima Hamlaoui ZAS, Berlin; University of Toronto Emmanuel-Moselly Makasso ZAS, Berlin
    Chapter 9 Downstep and recursive phonological phrases in Bàsàá (Bantu A43) Fatima Hamlaoui ZAS, Berlin; University of Toronto Emmanuel-Moselly Makasso ZAS, Berlin This paper identifies contexts in which a downstep is realized between consecu- tive H tones in absence of an intervening L tone in Bàsàá (Bantu A43, Cameroon). Based on evidence from simple sentences, we propose that this type of downstep is indicative of recursive prosodic phrasing. In particular, we propose that a down- step occurs between the phonological phrases that are immediately dominated by a maximal phonological phrase (휙max). 1 Introduction In their book on the relation between tone and intonation in African languages, Downing & Rialland (2016) describe the study of downtrends as almost being a field in itself in the field of prosody. In line with the considerable literature on the topic, they offer the following decomposition of downtrends: 1. Declination 2. Downdrift (or ‘automatic downstep’) 3. Downstep (or ‘non-automatic downstep’) 4. Final lowering 5. Register compression/expansion or register lowering/raising Fatima Hamlaoui & Emmanuel-Moselly Makasso. 2019. Downstep and recursive phonological phrases in Bàsàá (Bantu A43). In Emily Clem, Peter Jenks & Hannah Sande (eds.), Theory and description in African Linguistics: Selected papers from the47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, 155–175. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.3367136 Fatima Hamlaoui & Emmanuel-Moselly Makasso In the present paper, which concentrates on Bàsàá, a Narrow Bantu language (A43 in Guthrie’s classification) spoken in the Centre and Littoral regions of Cameroon by approx. 300,000 speakers (Lewis et al. 2015), we will first briefly define and discuss declination and downdrift, as the language displays bothphe- nomena.
    [Show full text]
  • Register in Eastern Cham: Phonological, Phonetic and Sociolinguistic Approaches
    REGISTER IN EASTERN CHAM: PHONOLOGICAL, PHONETIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC APPROACHES A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Marc Brunelle August 2005 © 2005 Marc Brunelle REGISTER IN EASTERN CHAM: PHONOLOGICAL, PHONETIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC APPROACHES Marc Brunelle, Ph.D. Cornell University, 2005 The Chamic language family is often cited as a test case for contact linguistics. Although Chamic languages are Austronesian, they are claimed to have converged with Mon-Khmer languages and adopted features from their closest neighbors. A good example of such a convergence is the realization of phonological register in Cham dialects. In many Southeast Asian languages, the loss of the voicing contrast in onsets has led to the development of two registers, bundles of features that initially included pitch, voice quality, vowel quality and durational differences and that are typically realized on rimes. While Cambodian Cham realizes register mainly through vowel quality, just like Khmer, the registers of the Cham dialect spoken in south- central Vietnam (Eastern Cham) are claimed to have evolved into tone, a property that plays a central role in Vietnamese phonology. This dissertation evaluates the hypothesis that contact with Vietnamese is responsible for the recent evolution of Eastern Cham register by exploring the nature of the sound system of Eastern Cham from phonetic, phonological and sociolinguistic perspectives. Proponents of the view that Eastern Cham has a complex tone system claim that tones arose from the phonemicization of register allophones conditioned by codas after the weakening or deletion of coda stops and laryngeals.
    [Show full text]
  • How Does Phonetics Interact with Phonology During Tone Sandhi?
    How does phonetics interact with phonology during tone sandhi? Bijun Ling Tongji University [email protected] ABSTRACT whether the phonological system affects the phonetic interaction of consonant and f0. This paper investigated the phonetics and phonology Shanghai Wu, a northern Wu dialect of Chinese, of consonant–f0 interaction in Shanghai Wu. Bi- offers a good study case for this research question. syllabic compound nouns, which form tone sandhi Shanghai Wu has five lexical tones, which can be domain, were elicited within template sentences with described by three features [27]: F0 contour: falling two factors controlled: lexical tones (T1[HM], (T1) and rising (T2-T5); Tonal register: high (T1, T2, T3[LM], T5[LMq]) and consonant types (obstruents T4) and low (T3, T5); and Duration: long (T1-T3) and & nasals). Results showed that although the base tone short (T4, T5). They exhibit interesting co-occurrence contrast of the second syllable is neutralized by patterns with both the onset and coda of the tone- phonological tone sandhi rules, the onset f0 of the bearing syllable. Syllables with voiceless onsets only second syllable with low tones (T3) is significantly allow tones that start in the high register, i.e. T1, T2 lower than that with high tone (T1). Furthermore, and T4; while voiced onsets co-occur with tones that such difference cannot be just attributed to the start in the low register, i.e. T3 and T5. Interestingly, consonant perturbation, because it also exists when the sonorant consonants could occur with both high the consonant (i.e. /m/) is the same for all three tones.
    [Show full text]
  • The Phonology of Tone and Intonation
    This page intentionally left blank The Phonology of Tone and Intonation Tone and Intonation are two types of pitch variation, which are used by speak- ers of many languages in order to give shape to utterances. More specifically, tone encodes morphemes, and intonation gives utterances a further discoursal meaning that is independent of the meanings of the words themselves. In this comprehensive survey, Carlos Gussenhoven provides an up-to-date overview of research into tone and intonation, discussing why speakers vary their pitch, what pitch variations mean, and how they are integrated into our grammars. He also explains why intonation in part appears to be universally understood, while at other times it is language-specific and can lead to misunderstandings. The first eight chapters concern general topics: phonetic aspects of pitch mod- ulation; typological notions (stress, accent, tone, and intonation); the distinction between phonetic implementation and phonological representation; the paralin- guistic meaning of pitch variation; the phonology and phonetics of downtrends; developments from the Pierrehumbert–Beckman model; and tone and intona- tion in Optimality Theory. In chapters 9–15, the book’s central arguments are illustrated with comprehensive phonological descriptions – partly in OT – of the tonal and intonational systems of six languages, including Japanese, French, and English. Accompanying sound files can be found on the author’s web site: http://www.let.kun.nl/pti Carlos Gussenhoven is Professor and Chair of General and Experimental Phonology at the University of Nijmegen. He has previously published On the Grammar and Semantics of Sentence Accents (1994), English Pronunciation for Student Teachers (co-authored with A.
    [Show full text]
  • Expressing Concession by Means of Nuclear Pitch Accent
    Nima Sadat-Tehrani Centennial College, Canada Expressing Concession by Means of Nuclear Pitch Accent The purpose of this research is to introduce a certain function of the nuclear pitch accent in Persian, i.e., the expression of concession. A nuclear pitch accent in this usage serves as a preface to a following statement, in which the speaker offers an alternative or contradictory point of view towards a previously highlighted discourse. This nuclear pitch accent is on a final verbal element in the utterance, and crucially, this final element is not associated with any pitch accent in the normal declarative reading of the same utterance, and it is only in this structure that it becomes nuclear-accented. Thus, the nuclear pitch accent behaves here as an intonational morpheme, but one that is bound to its location in the utterance. The paper also investigates the occurrence of this phenomenon in monoclausals, biclausals, and scrambled sentences, and identifies the constraints on its realization. Keywords: Persian, intonation, nuclear pitch accent, concession, contrast. 1. Introduction This paper explores an intonation pattern in modern colloquial Persian. The meaning conveyed by this pattern is that of concession or contradiction directed towards a proposition highlighted in the previous discourse, and it acts as an introduction to an upcoming assertion. What makes this pattern unique is the location of the nuclear pitch accent (NPA), i.e., the last pitch accent in an intonational phrase, a.k.a. sentence stress. Consider the ordinary declarative in Example (1) accompanied by its pitch track and wave form in Figure 1. The stressed syllable in each accentual phrase (AP) is shown with an accent mark, and the NPA is underlined.1 (1) hævá æbrí !od–".
    [Show full text]
  • English Words with Phonetic Transcription Pdf
    English Words With Phonetic Transcription Pdf Unfortunate Timothee quells definably. Which Dru necrotize so waitingly that Stanislaw gathers her rollneck? Spud locates his incidentals homologised despondingly, but letter-perfect Woodie never hogtied so descriptively. Taipei: American Magazine Center. They may not represent your particular vowel set. Throughout several centuries English scholars have advocated spelling reform. Take some time to examine the IPA chart. Many writers stress that phonetic specification of RP is central to its definition. When a voiceless sound is followed by a voiced sound such as a vowel, the vocal cords must close so they can vibrate. The Origins and Development of the English Languageed. If the symbol schwa is inserted, the syllabic mark will no longer be used, as the consonants lose their syllabicity, cf. Letters may be continued for use of the weak form a number of air escapes through the students to transcribe clients with it only phonemes for words with phonetic transcription. This is what is appropriate for dictionaries and language textbooks. The details of this process, however, are not equally clear in all cases. Practical Phonetics and Phonology. Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Longman, etc. The onset of a syllable consists of all the consonants that precede a that the onset may consist of either a single consonant or a In syllables with no initial consonant, there would be no onset. English, not just the phonemic ones. There were a lot of people in the room who wanted to stay. If two sounds are simply characteristic of a language, but are never used to distinguish one meaning from another, they are phones, but they are not phonemes.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction to Japanese Computational Linguistics Francis Bond and Timothy Baldwin
    1 Introduction to Japanese Computational Linguistics Francis Bond and Timothy Baldwin The purpose of this chapter is to provide a brief introduction to the Japanese language, and natural language processing (NLP) research on Japanese. For a more complete but accessible description of the Japanese language, we refer the reader to Shibatani (1990), Backhouse (1993), Tsujimura (2006), Yamaguchi (2007), and Iwasaki (2013). 1 A Basic Introduction to the Japanese Language Japanese is the official language of Japan, and belongs to the Japanese language family (Gordon, Jr., 2005).1 The first-language speaker pop- ulation of Japanese is around 120 million, based almost exclusively in Japan. The official version of Japanese, e.g. used in official settings andby the media, is called hyōjuNgo “standard language”, but Japanese also has a large number of distinctive regional dialects. Other than lexical distinctions, common features distinguishing Japanese dialects are case markers, discourse connectives and verb endings (Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyujyo, 1989–2006). 1There are a number of other languages in the Japanese language family of Ryukyuan type, spoken in the islands of Okinawa. Other languages native to Japan are Ainu (an isolated language spoken in northern Japan, and now almost extinct: Shibatani (1990)) and Japanese Sign Language. Readings in Japanese Natural Language Processing. Francis Bond, Timothy Baldwin, Kentaro Inui, Shun Ishizaki, Hiroshi Nakagawa and Akira Shimazu (eds.). Copyright © 2016, CSLI Publications. 1 Preview 2 / Francis Bond and Timothy Baldwin 2 The Sound System Japanese has a relatively simple sound system, made up of 5 vowel phonemes (/a/,2 /i/, /u/, /e/ and /o/), 9 unvoiced consonant phonemes (/k/, /s/,3 /t/,4 /n/, /h/,5 /m/, /j/, /ó/ and /w/), 4 voiced conso- nants (/g/, /z/,6 /d/ 7 and /b/), and one semi-voiced consonant (/p/).
    [Show full text]
  • Tone & Intonation
    Tone & Intonation Tone • Linguistic uses of pitch (f0) gestures • Two contrasting tones (or pitch gestures): H, L • Complex tonal patterns can be decomposed into sequences of H and L. • Tone gestures and sequences of tone gestures can be coordinated with (coupled to): • syllables (“lexical tone”) — distinguish lexical items • words (“pitch accent”) — distinguish lexical items • phrases (“intonation”) — distinguish syntactic and pragmatic structures. Assignment to Syllables: Register Tones • can be used to contrast lexical items • used in a majority of the world’s languages Yoruba (Nigeria) Hombert, 1976 Shona (Zimbabwe) Bini (Nigeria) F0 of [wa] of F0 up to 5 contrastive tone levels: how do they result from H, L?? H and L tones in Embosi (Bantu Language in Congo) H L Contours • Multiple pitch gesture per syllable: contour tone • Pitch gestures may not have their own syllable to be coupled to. • Or, their coupled vowels may be elided in running speech when adjacent to another vowel. • They can then be coordinated with a preceding or following syllable creating a tonal sequence. Etsako (Nigeria) Shekgalagari (Bantu, Botswana) (Hyman & Monaka, 2011) Assignment of Tone Sequences to Syllables: Contour Tones • Tonal sequence can contrast lexical items Standard Chinese Gao (2006) Coupling Assignment of Tone Sequences to Words: Pitch Accents • Words can contrast in terms of pitch gestures assigned to them, but not every syllable can independently bear pitch gestures. • Words contrast in accent type: 2 Croatian sequences of pitch gestures. • Early rise (L+H* L-L%) /mlada/ 'the bride' • Late rise (L*+H L-L%) /mara/ proper name (‘Mara’) • Patterns are "strung out" over words of 2- or 3- syllable words.
    [Show full text]
  • The Role of Secondary-Stressed and Unstressed-Unreduced Syllables in Word Recognition: Acoustic and Perceptual Studies with Russian Learners of English
    THE ROLE OF SECONDARY-STRESSED AND UNSTRESSED-UNREDUCED SYLLABLES IN WORD RECOGNITION: ACOUSTIC AND PERCEPTUAL STUDIES WITH RUSSIAN LEARNERS OF ENGLISH Elina Banzina A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 2012 Committee: Laura Dilley, Advisor Lynne Hewitt, Chair Sheri Wells-Jensen, Graduate Faculty Representative Alexander Goberman John Folkins © 2012 Elina Banzina All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Laura Dilley, Advisor Identifying those phonological factors that native listeners rely on most when perceiving non-native speech is critical for setting priorities in pronunciation instruction. The importance of accurate lexical stress production, particularly primary stress, has been explored. However, little is known about the role of Secondary-stressed (SS) syllables and Unstressed-unreduced (UU) syllables, and the importance of their accuracy for speech perception. These questions are of relevance for Russian learners of English, who often reduce English SS and UU vowels—a phenomenon which is arguably due to the fact that only one stressed syllable per word is allowed in Russian phonology. Moreover, second language research has not addressed the issue of vowel over-reduction, which is a pattern typical of Russian learners. Low-accuracy productions of SS and UU syllables are generally not expected to lead to unintelligibility; however, they might interfere with the ease and accuracy with which speech is perceived. An acoustic study first compared realization of SS and UU syllables in words produced in isolation by six Russian learners of English and six native English speakers. Words were selected to contain low vowels and specific UU and SS syllable positions to optimally reflect vowel reduction by Russian speakers.
    [Show full text]
  • UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Phonlab Annual Report
    UC Berkeley UC Berkeley PhonLab Annual Report Title On the Representation of Tone in Peñoles Mixtec Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6x08707m Journal UC Berkeley PhonLab Annual Report, 1(1) ISSN 2768-5047 Authors Daly, John P Hyman, Larry M Publication Date 2005 DOI 10.5070/P76x08707m eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2005) Submitted to IJAL On the Representation of Tone in Peñoles Mixtec John P. Daly Summer Institute of Linguistics and Larry M. Hyman University of California, Berkeley ABSTRACT This paper presents a systematic account of the tone system of Peñoles Mixtec (PM). While /H/ and /L/ tones are unambiguously needed in underlying representations, it is argued that the third tone is not /M/, but must rather be underspecified as /Ø/. Perhaps the most interesting of the several arguments presented is that strings of /Ø/ tone-bearing units are invisible to a process which deletes the second /L/ of a /L-Ø*-L/ sequence. We propose that all /L/ tones are underlying floating and that /L/ rather than /H/ is the marked tone in this three-value system. The surface mid and low-falling pitches in outputs are shown to derive by a small number of realizational rules, which also are responsible for producing successively upstepped H tones. The PM tone system is unusually interesting both from a general tonological perspective as well as for its relation to Dürr’s (1987) Proto-Mixtec tones which have the inverted values in PM. KEYWORDS: underspecification, markedness, obligatory contour principle, upstepping, floating tones 1.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 GEMINATE INALTERABILITY and LENITION Robert Kirchner, UCLA
    DRAFT, March 13, 1998 GEMINATE INALTERABILITY AND LENITION Robert Kirchner, UCLA ÙGdÕgen ˚dÃmavay £iy‚·nLHah doxe'oh OwpÕqÕtiyñ£i'Õw Ecclesiastes 4:12 0. INTRODUCTION It is a well-known observation that phonological processes which apply to short segments frequently fail to apply to corresponding long ("geminate") segments. For example, post-vocalic e e e spirantization of velar stops in Tigrinya yields [/a-xalIb] 'dogs' (cf. [ke lbi] 'dog'), but [f kk r ] e e e e e 'boasts', not [fe xk r ] nor [f xx r ] (Kenstowicz 1982).1 This phenomenon of geminate "inalterability" or "blockage" has been the subject of a number of proposals within the framework of Autosegmental Phonology, most influentially Hayes 1986 and Schein & Steriade 1986.2 Subsequent research, however, has revealed that these proposals make seriously incorrect predictions as to the class of processes which display inalterability (see Inkelas & Cho 1993). As Churma (1988) observes, geminate inalterability holds true as a universally inviolable condition only in the domain of lenition phenomena, a generalization which the classic inalterability approaches fail to capture. Moreover, as Elmedlaoui 1993 notes, within the domain of lenition phenomena, the classic approaches are insufficiently restrictive: they fail to rule out processes which specifically target geminates for lenition, e.g. /kk/ -> *[xx], or which convert an underlying singleton to a lenited geminate, e.g. /k/ -> *[xx]; and they fail to draw a connection between inalterability and the general markedness of "weaker" (i.e. continuant and voiced (obstruent)) geminates, whether derived via some lenition process or present underlyingly. In light of major shifts in phonological theory which have occurred since the previous cycle of inalterability research, particularly the development of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1Here and throughout, transcriptions have been modified to conform with IPA.
    [Show full text]
  • The Tai-Kadai Languages Resources for Thai Language Research
    This article was downloaded by: 10.3.98.104 On: 26 Sep 2021 Access details: subscription number Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG, UK The Tai-Kadai Languages Anthony V. N. Diller, Jerold A. Edmondson, Yongxian Luo Resources for Thai Language Research Publication details https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203641873.ch3 Anthony Diller Published online on: 11 Jun 2008 How to cite :- Anthony Diller. 11 Jun 2008, Resources for Thai Language Research from: The Tai- Kadai Languages Routledge Accessed on: 26 Sep 2021 https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203641873.ch3 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR DOCUMENT Full terms and conditions of use: https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/legal-notices/terms This Document PDF may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproductions, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The publisher shall not be liable for an loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. PART 2 TAI LANGUAGES: OVERVIEWS AND RESOURCES Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 19:02 26 Sep 2021; For: 9780203641873, chapter3, 10.4324/9780203641873.ch3 29 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 19:02 26 Sep 2021; For: 9780203641873, chapter3, 10.4324/9780203641873.ch3 30 CHAPTER THREE 3.
    [Show full text]