Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

In this paper I raise the question of whether there are systematic differences between the lexical vs. grammatical functions of tone. Researchers of tone are largely influenced by the properties of the language(s) on which they work. Since tone has an almost exclusively lexical function in East and Southeast Asian languages, researchers of these languages focus primarily on how languages and speakers distinguish tone on lexical morphemes. Languages such Thai, Vietnamese and the wide range within Chinese lead one to posit a particular typology of lexical, monosyllabic tones which may...

According to Selkirk’s (2011) “match theory”, the mapping of syntactic structure onto prosodic domains is universal. What this means is that if a language chooses to implement the relation between syntactic- or phrase-structure in the phonology, certain syntax-phonology relations should be predictable (and others not possible). This potentially produces asymmetries, as in Luganda, where a verb forms a tone phrase with what follows (e.g. an object, adjunct, right-dislocation), but not with what precedes (e.g. the subject, adverbial, left-dislocation). The purpose of my talk is to...

One of the major unresolved issues in the study of word-accentual systems is determining what exactly counts as accent, a problem which is further complicated in languages with tone or so-called pitch-accent. In this chapter I address three African cases where the positional prominence effects are clearly word level, reasonably subject to a metrical (accentual) interpretation, but do not consistently coincide. In Ibibio, a Cross-River language spoken in Nigeria, greater consonant and vowel contrasts suggests that the initial stem syllable is the accented head of a trochaic foot,...

This paper presents a description of the segmental and prosodic phonology of Muniche, a critically endangered Peruvian Amazonian isolate. Using data from team-based fieldwork with a group of rememberers of Muniche, this paper describes the segmental inventory, syllable structure, and stress system of the language, plus a number of prosodically motivated epenthetic processes. A historical overview of the language and its contact with neighboring Kawapanan languages is also presented. Finally, the results of this study are compared with Gibson (1996), the sole previous study of Muniche...