ROA: | 169 |
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Title: | Stress and tone in Dagaare |
Authors: | Arto Anttila, Adams Bodomo |
Comment: | |
Length: | 47 |
Abstract: | Arto Anttila Adams Bodomo Stanford University Stanford University/ Norwegian University of Science and Technology Dagaare (Gur) is a two-tone language of northwestern Ghana with approximately 1,000,000 native speakers. Most of the canonical disyllabic nominals fall into three tonal classes: L-H, H-L and H-H. In the first two, the second tone is a polarity tone: a suffix assumes the opposite tone to that of the root. L-L is systematically absent. Based on our primary descriptive work, supplemented by the fieldnotes of Kennedy (1966), we show that several tonal processes distinguish between LEXICAL and DERIVED tones and, in addition, there is evidence for penultimate STRESS. The surface tonal patterns result from an attempt to optimally satisfy (i) one-to-one correspondence between input tones, output tones and TBUs and (ii) the preference of stressed syllables for H and lexical tones. We show that the lexical/derived distinction and several familiar tonal phenomena, e.g. spreading, contour formation and floating tones can be captured by the notion of correspondence (McCarthy and Prince 1995). Tonal polarity is analyzed as a stress phenomenon: penultimate stress attracts lexical tones and leaves the unstressed final syllable with whatever is the contextually optimal derived tone, i.e. the polarity tone. Similarly, underlyingly toneless words which are at least two syllables long become H-H due to stress which explains the systematic absence of L-L. |
Type: | Paper/tech report |
Area/Keywords: | |
Article: | Version 1 |