A phonological account of Tlapanec (Mè’phàà) tonal alternation

Tlapanec (Mè’phàà) is known for its enigmatic tonal alternation in verb forms according to person and aspect-mode categories, in addition to suppletion and other segmental alternations. In this paper, we argue that the tonal alternations observed in Tlapanec regular agentive verbs can be straightforwardly accounted for by phonology, without resorting to any extreme abstractness: the lexical tones of the prefixes and the verb stems, with underspecification and floating tones, and cross-linguistically common tone processes such as tone spreading and floating tone docking. Such a phonological (or a morpheme-based) approach is contrasted with a word-based approach, where tonal alternations are viewed as inflectional classes. We show that the phonological approach is more adequate than a word-based approach.

Priming the Representation of Left-Dominant Sandhi Words: A Shanghai Dialect Case Study

The paper aims to examine how the acoustic input (the surface form) and the abstract linguistic representation (the underlying representation) interact during spoken word recognition by investigating left-dominant tone sandhi, a tonal alternation in which the underlying tone of the first syllable spreads to the sandhi domain. We conducted two auditory-auditory priming lexical decision experiments on Shanghai left-dominant sandhi words with less-frequent and frequent Shanghai users, in which each disyllabic target was preceded by monosyllabic primes either sharing the same underlying tone, surface tone, or being unrelated to the tone of the first syllable of the sandhi targets. Results showed a surface priming effect but not an underlying priming effect in younger speakers who used Shanghai less frequently, but no surface or underlying priming effect in older speakers who used Shanghai more often. Moreover, the surface priming did not interact with speakers’ familiarity ratings to the sandhi targets. These patterns suggest that left-dominant Shanghai sandhi words may be represented in the sandhi form in the mental lexicon. The results are discussed in the context of how phonological opacity, productivity, the non-structure-preserving nature of tone spreading, and speakers’ semantic knowledge influence the representation and processing of tone sandhi words.

Tone assignment and grammatical tone in Anal (Tibeto-Burman)

Complex phenomena of grammatical tone, well-described for many African languages, are increasingly attested also in the Tibeto-Burman family. This paper describes the tone assignment rule and two cases of tonal expression of grammatical categories in the Tibeto-Burman language Anal. The typologically unusual rule involves tone spreading, tonal polarity on a non-edge constituent and additional spreading, resulting in constant tonal patterns across grammatical suffixes. In two different cases the combination of the tonal pattern assigned by this rule with peculiar morpho-tonological processes results in a marking of a grammatical category (future and 1sg-person) by grammatical tone, by vowel-length, or only by the overall tonal pattern of the verbal form. Both cases are related to the omission of an explicit marking of the category, although the outcome cannot be explained only by the concept of a floating tone.

Layered feet laid bare in Copperbelt Bemba tone

In this paper, we identify a new type of ternarity found in bounded tone spreading in Copperbelt Bemba (Bickmore & Kula 2013).We argue that this ternarity must be metrical in nature, because it is quantity-sensitive and therefore not capturable in a straightforward counting rule.Traditional binary feet approaches to ternarity hinge on the minimal presence of unparsed syllables.However, ternarity in Copperbelt Bemba can occur in the presence of a multitude of unparsed syllables.Consequently, we argue that Copperbelt Bemba demands a larger foot constituent.We apply layered feet (Martínez-Paricio & Kager, 2013) to the analysis of the pattern, proposing that the foot in Copperbelt Bemba has an inner iamb and a monomoraic adjunct.The data is complicated by cases of falling tones on heavy syllables. We propose that these are reflections of syllable integrity violating feet, and point to other cases where this representational device has been used. Thus, we identify Copperbelt Bemba as the first instance of a blended foot, which allows more syllable integrity violations than syllabic feet, but fewer than moraic feet.

Customised Ibadan-Yoruba

This article reports that Reverend Gbade Ogunlana, popularly known as Paito wa, uses the Ibadan dialect of Yoruba in his preaching, but deploys available phonological mechanisms to add a sort of comic impression to his speech. Consonant deletion, which is usually minimised in public domains of speaking are rather maximised in his speaking, while tone spreading is accentuated to produce acute rising and falling contours. Further, it is reported that he prefers lexical borrowings which allow him the freedom to then adapt the borrowed words in the layman’s manner. This freedom is also apparent in the use of novel words which he is able to pronounce in the layman’s manner. It is argued that the intent of these is to add humour to his preaching, and accommodate his target audience for social identity and better understanding, an intention he appears to achieve with his choice of style.

Phrasal phonology in Copperbelt Bemba

Copperbelt Bemba exhibits several rightward spreading tonal processes which are sensitive to prosodic phrase structure. The rightmost H tone in a word will undergo unbounded spreading if the word is final in a phonological phrase (φ). In an intonational phrase consisting of several single-word φ's, the rightmost H in the first word will spread through all following toneless φ's. From a rule-based perspective, this can only be accounted for by positing mutually feeding iterative rules, as a single H-tone spreading rule cannot account for the long-distance spreading. Rather, a second rule that spreads a H from the final mora of one word onto the initial mora of the following word is required, as a bridge to further unbounded spreading. Three phrase-sensitive OT constraints are proposed to account for H-tone spreading between words. One is of the domain-juncture variety, requiring the specification of two separate prosodic domains.

Ternary spreading and the OCP in Copperbelt Bemba

Bemba tonology has been described with respect to two prominent claims: H tone local spreading is binary, and is blocked by the OCP. These claims are based on Bemba, as spoken in Northern Zambia. This paper examines these two claims with respect to contemporary Bemba as it is spoken today in the Copperbelt province of Zambia. This paper shows that in Copperbelt Bemba (CB), these two aspects of H tone spreading are markedly different. In CB, local spreading is ternary, not binary, and a H will undergo binary spreading even if it causes an OCP violation. Ternary spread will be shown to follow from two rules: High Tone Doubling and Secondary High Doubling motivated by different constraints within CB tonology. In addition to documenting and describing the behavior of high tone in CB, a comparison to other cases of ternary spreading is also made.