Question Word Intonation in Tashlhiyt Berber: Is ‘high’ good enough?

Abstract

The present study investigates the intonational marking of question words (qwords) in Tashlhiyt Berber. The first part of the study identifies a number of possible prosodic patterns on qwords as employed in conversational contexts. When they occur in a direct interrogative, qwords are marked with a rise in pitch towards a H(igh) target and a subsequent fall. By contrast, when the qword is embedded, no tonal targets occur on it. The second part consists of a detailed investigation of the alignment and scaling of qwords in utterance-initial position and in narrow focus. While the H target is consistently present somewhere on the qword, neither a local F0 maximum nor a high plateau region is characterized by stable alignment with any specific position in the segmental string. Scaling of the starting point (%L) and endpoint (H) of the rise characteristic of the qword exhibited a dependency on alignment: The rise is somewhat truncated if the peak is aligned early in the word. This study's results shed more light on the intonation system of Tashlhiyt and support earlier findings suggesting that tonal placement in this language is prone to a typologically unusual degree of variability.

A story of two schwas: a production study from Tashlhiyt

“…In polar questions, the F0 peak is expected to be systematically attracted to the final heavy syllable of the utterance (i.e. [him]), in accordance with previous findings (Gordon & Nafi 2012, Grice et al 2015, Roettger & Grice 2015, Roettger 2016, Bruggeman et al 2017). In other words, prominence is not expected to be found on target [ikʃm], and prosodically functional schwas are thus unlikely to occur in this context.…”

Tonal marking of absolutive case in Samoan

“…This is an example of prosodic boundary tones that are not aligned to edges, and indeed, perhaps not even associated to any prosodic structure. Bruggeman et al (2017) finds variable alignment of a H tonal target within focused question words 'qwords,' e.g., 'what' and phrases, e.g., 'which pineapple' in Tashlhiyt Berber. The qword tones in question phrases are consequently analyzed as being associated directly to the focused qword/phrase rather than some specified prosodic constituent, see Bruggeman et al (2017, Fig.…”

“…The term 'edge tone' is often taken to be interchangeable with the term '(prosodic) boundary tone' and associated with a "major prosodic boundary," i.e., above the level of a prosodic word-a phonological phrase boundary or intonational phrase boundary (Ladd 2008:44, 47, 100). But in this paper, I use 'edge tone' purely descriptively to refer to what conditions where the tone appears in the surface realization: to roughly distinguish between tones whose phonetic alignment is determined by stress position (pitch accents) and tones whose alignment is determined by morphosyntactic/prosodic word edges (edge tones) (Bruggeman et al 2017, Sect. 1.1), see Sect.…”

The Autosegmental-Metrical Model of Intonational Phonology

“…In phrase-initial position, an H tone can be realized as a peak with variable alignment within a constituent or optionally as a plateau extending over the whole constituent (Bruggeman, Roettger, and Grice 2017;Bruggeman 2018; see figure 1c.2). This further supports an analy sis of tones having an association to a constituent without this being reflected in alignment with either a head or an edge.…”