Romancing with tone: On the outcomes of prosodic contact

Abstract

This article presents a descriptive and theoretical framework for the analysis of prosodic systems that have emerged from contact between African tone and European intonation-only languages. A comparative study of the prosodic systems of two Romance contact varieties, Central African French and Equatorial Guinean Spanish, shows that they feature two-tone systems, fixed word-tone patterns, tonal minimal pairs, the arbitrary assignment of tone in function words, and tonal processes. Evidence from further contact varieties and creole languages shows that similar systems evolved in other Afro-European contact ecologies. We conclude that tone is imposed by default on contact varieties and creoles that take shape in ecologies characterized by sourcelanguage agentivity in tone languages. In doing so, we argue against claims that tone necessarily cedes to stress during language contact and creolization. Instead, contact varieties and creoles partake just like other languages in the convergence processes that lead to the areal clustering of prosodic systems.*

Creole Prosodic Systems Are Areal, Not Simple

“…Central African French and Equatorial Guinean Spanish have been analyzed as equipollent /H, L/ systems with fully specified tone and no stress ( Bordal Steien and Yakpo, 2020 ). In Central African French, an /H/ is realized on the final syllable of every content word, thus replicating the most frequent position of phrasal stress at the word level in European French.…”

“… Ratliff (2015 , 258) cautions against broad explanations for tonogenesis in language contact because they fail to explain ‘exactly how tones were either transferred to—or stimulated to develop in—previously atonal languages under contact’. Bordal Steien and Yakpo (2020) propose three specific cognitive-typological mechanisms in the genesis of contact prosodic systems with tone, namely: (1) stress-to-tone mapping (section 4.1), (2) paradigmatization (section 4.2), and (3) idiosyncratization (section 4.3).…”

“…Through the mechanism of stress-to-tone mapping speakers of tone languages create a tone system in the contact language or variety by building on perceptual analogies between the phonetic realizations of stress and tone ( Bordal Steien and Yakpo, 2020 , 23–26).…”

“…The second mechanism in the creation of contact prosodic systems is paradigmatization ( Bordal Steien and Yakpo, 2020 , 26–28). Paradigmatization occurs by default when stress patterns of the non-tonal lexifier are mapped onto tone patterns in the contact languages and varieties.…”

“…The prosodic systems of creoles and colonial varieties (contact prosodic systems) have developed tone or stress systems in accordance with the linguistic factor of areal typology (dominance of tone vs. stress in the ecology), the cognitive factor of psycholinguistic dominance (recipient vs. source-language agentivity), and social factors in their specific linguistic ecologies (the demographic proportion and social stratification of speakers of tone and stress-only languages) ( Bordal Steien and Yakpo, 2020 ; Yakpo, 2020 ).…”