Tonal marking of absolutive case in Samoan

Abstract

Samoan is an ergative-marking, (reportedly) non-tonal Polynesian language in which ergative case is marked segmentally, but absolutive case has been said to be unmarked. This paper shows that in fact, a high edge tone co-occurs with absolutive arguments, based on converging evidence from the phonetic and phonological analysis of intonational patterns in the spoken utterances of a systematically varied set of syntactic structures. This empirical observation raises puzzles that probe the nature of the syntax-prosody interface and the relation between tone and intonation: what is the relation between this absolutive high edge tone and: (i) other case markers in Samoan, which are all segmental?, and (ii) other high edge tones in Samoan that co-occur with fronted expressions and coordination? I propose that: (i) the absolutive high edge tone is a tonal case marker that may be related to an apparently moribund stressed, segmental absolutive particle ["ia], (ii) the high tones that co-occur with absolutives, fronting, and coordination are all syntactically determined and each inserted in the spellout of distinct syntactic configurations, and (iii) there is another class of edge tones which reliably co-occur with pauses-intonational phrase boundary tones-that are not inserted in spellout but by the phonological grammar. While my proposal may seem surprising at first, I show that it fits the current data better than any alternative.

Focus Effects on Immediate and Delayed Recognition of Referents in Samoan

“…The rest of the sentence is produced with a lower pitch range, although there is an accent on every content word. There is also an H- phrase tone immediately before the post-verbal object in Figure 1(b), as is typical in Samoan (see Yu, 2021 and Calhoun, 2017 for discussion of the function of these tones). Table 2 shows acoustic measures (mean F0, duration, and mean intensity) of the stressed syllable of the cleft head and the argument in the main clause, which were generated using a Praat script.…”

The many shapes of H*

“…Indeed, there are several studies which show that there is more variability in tonal alignment than anticipated based on the tonal anchoring hypothesis (e.g., [7] on Serbian and Croatian, [8] on Manchego Spanish, [9] on German, [10] on Italian and German). These findings have led researchers to explore alternative methods of capturing phonetic differences between accents, such Tonal Center of Gravity [11] and curve analysis (e.g., [12] on Greek, [13] on Samoan). Despite the increasing popularity of these new methods, tonal target scaling and alignment are still widely used (e.g., [14] on Spanish, [15] on English).…”