The interaction of tone and stress in Optimality Theory

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between tone and prosodic positions. I show that prosodic heads prefer higher tone over lower tone, while non-heads exhibit the opposite preference. These generalisations are expressed within Optimality Theory as a family of constraints in a fixed ranking. One set regulates the relation of tone to heads : *H\L *H\M *H\H ; the other deals with tone on nonheads : *N-H\H *N-H\M *N-H\L. These constraints are used to account for the stress system of Ayutla Mixtec : in this language, stress is attracted to a syllable based on its tonal content, but is also influenced by the posttonic syllable's tone. The implications of the theory for other tone-stress interactions-metrically influenced tone placement and neutralisation-are also examined. * I wish to thank John McCarthy, Lisa Selkirk, three anonymous reviewers and the associate editor, who offered many constructive suggestions for improvement. I am also grateful to John Kingston, Alan Prince, Keren Rice and Moira Yip for their comments on various manifestations of this work. For guidance related to the languages discussed, I thank Lee Bickmore, Barbara Hollenbach, Inga McKendry and Ken Pike. 1 In (1) and elsewhere the numbers of parentheses give the page and column in Pankratz & Pike (1967) from which the form is taken. 2 It is quite possible that the Tonal Prominence scale is a total order of all possible heights, which may number as many as six (Odden 1995 : 453ff). The examples I have collected only provide evidence for three tone-height distinctions in relation to stress (see § §3 and 6), so a conservative form of the hierarchy is used here. I am preceded in proposing a tonal hierarchy by Jiang-King (1996 : 99), who offers the hierarchy [jupper] [kraised]. I will show that more than a two-step tonal hierarchy is needed (see §3). 3 This proposal is analogous to Clements' (1997) for sonority-syllable constraints. Constraints against the least marked tone-head combinations would also have an undesirable typological effect. They would allow systems in which foot heads cannot bear tone while non-heads can : *H\H F(Tone) *N-H\H, where F(Tone) is some faithfulness constraint that preserves input tone. I know of no such system, while the opposite type of system-one where tone is only specified on heads-does exist (e.g. Yip 2001). 'phõ:mí phõ:'mí (33) Tone-driven stress in Tibetan a. b.

Accent classes in South Kyengsang Korean: Lexical drift, novel words and loanwords

“…De Lacy 2002) b. Nonfinality (NF): penalize a word-final syllable associated with a high tone (Prince and Smolensky 2004) c. Align-High-Right (Align-R): assign a penalty for each low tone syllable that separates a high tone from the end of the word d. *Lapse: penalize two successive low-tone syllables (Zoll 2003) e. *Clash: penalize two successive syllables associated with a high tone (Zoll 2003) f. *Asp-L: penalize a syllable with low tone whose onset is aspirated or tense Table 50 shows the weights assigned to these constraints by the Maxent algorithm with its default mu and sigma settings based on the 5,569 disyllabic and trisyllabic words from Tables 19 and 27. In disyllabic words, *Clash and *Asp-L are weighted high, followed by NF, while W-to-H and Align-R receive the lowest weights and do not work to position prominence on the heavy syllable in the disyllabic lexicon.…”

Markedness in Urban East Norwegian tonal accent

“…Here I appeal to a constraint family proposed in de Lacy (2002). The central claim in de Lacy's proposal is that high tones are attracted to metrical heads and avoid non-heads, while the converse is true for low tones.…”

Deriving bounded tone with layered feet in Harmonic Serialism: The case of Saghala

“…A major previous work on this topic is De Lacy (2002). Comparison between the present proposal and De Lacy's is taken up in section 5.4.…”