Exclusives, equatives and prosodic phrases in Samoan

Abstract

This paper investigates the functions of prosodic phrasing in the Austronesian VSO language Samoan. Two types of sentences are investigated, exclusives (involving the particle na'o 'only') and equatives. Two complementary methodologies were used, a production study and an acceptability judgment study, to examine the prosodic realisation and relative naturalness of different word orderings of the two sentence types. The particle na'o has an unusual distribution: preceding the initial constituent, be it the verb or a fronted noun phrase; or following the verb, but only modifying the absolutive (object). It was found that post-verbal absolutives modified by na'o are usually not preceded by a phrase boundary, unlike unmodified absolutives which are consistently preceded by a high phrase tone (H-) (cf. Yu 2009). Equatives in Samoan involve clauses which are the juxtaposition of two noun phrases, one the rheme (focus) and the other the theme (topic). It was found that rhemes are usually followed by a phrase break, while for themes this is optional. Rheme-theme order was strongly preferred to theme-rheme order. These findings are argued to show a close relationship between information structure, constituent ordering and prosodic phrasing in Samoan. The preferred order of constituents in Samoan is rheme-theme, with a high phrase tone marking the end of the rheme. The absolutive argument is strongly preferred to be at the start of the theme.

(In)variability in the Samoan syntax/prosody interface and consequences for syntactic parsing

“…At the present time, we do not yet have enough data to understand if there are systematic differences between the distribution of edge tones followed by an audible pause and those that are not, or how multiple edge tones from a variety of grammatical sources might interact when appearing at a single edge, or if a single edge tone might simultaneously come from multiple grammatical sources. Calhoun (2017) makes a valuable contribution here, showing that the appearance of both low and high sentence-medial edge tones is quite common, though variable, in sentences with 'exclusive' [naʔo] constructions and 'equative' copular constructions. While the majority of her figures of representative intonational transcriptions show edge tones followed by (often quite long) silent pauses, the transcriptional count data given doesn't distinguish between whether these edge tones are followed by pauses or not.…”

“…It would be interesting if the optional edge tones that occur in Calhoun's (2017) constructions before the predicate and between arguments in equatives are typically followed by pauses, since the H-tones we've discussed here for absolutives, coordination, and fronting invariably appear and are typically not followed by pauses. Such a systematic distinction might suggest that variably appearing edge tones typically followed by pauses have a different grammatical source, e.g., prosodic grammar, than those that are not, e.g., syntactic grammar, and that, accordingly, we would want to handle them differently in production and comprehension models.…”

“…26 But we make some preliminary observations about L-tones here; for further discussion of low edge tones (and high edge tones) followed by pauses, see Calhoun (2017) and Yu (2017). Sentence-medial low edge tones often occur with a pause (see Tables 3-9), and always occur with pitch reset, in the sense that the pitch restarts with a high peak, even when there are unstressed elements immediately following the L tone (annotated as 'reset' in Figure 9).…”

“…Moreover, although Calhoun (2017) shows that no Happears before post-verbal absolutive arguments under [naɁo] 'only' and argues that this data is problematic for positing an absolutive H-, Yu and Özyıldız (2016, Section 3.4.1) and Yu (2017) …”

“…For the moment, we simply adopt the Collins proposal without his additional proposed explanation of the missing ergative /e/ in tautala leaga, leaving the resolution of that issue to future work. Yu and Stabler: (In) Calhoun (2017) also found many examples of high edge tones followed by pauses. We discuss high edge tones followed by pauses further in Section 6 and Yu (2017) and leave them aside for now.…”