A Subsegmental Correspondence Approach to Contour Tone (Dis)Harmony Patterns

<p>Contour tones, like contour segments, exhibit dualist syntagmatic behavior: as whole units, <span style="font-size: 10px;">they can participate in harmony (spreading) and disharmony (OCP-type restriction) processes </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">or their internal, subsegmental components may act independently. Formally, such schizoid </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">behavior from both contour tones and segments in (dis)harmony patterns has challenged </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">previous phonological theory. As a solution, this paper presents a novel, quantized phonological </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">representation for subsegmental units couched in existing surface correspondence theory </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">(Agreement by Correspondence (ABC); Hansson 2001; Rose &amp; Walker 2004; et seq.). The </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">resulting approach, termed ABC+Q, treats tonally contoured segments as strings of tonally </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">simplex subsegments and is thus capable of modeling both whole contour (segment-level) </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">and partial contour (subsegment-level) effects as consequences of (dis)agreement triggered by </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">phonological similarity and proximity. Such an approach makes it possible for the first time </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">to offer a united treatment for the behavior of both contour tones and contour segments across </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">observed patterns of (dis)harmony.</span></p>