Tone: Is it Different?

Hyman, Larry M.

doi:10.5070/p71sr5f98x

Cited by 18 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 75 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…But they conflict with the fact that tone has a phonetic correlate (pitch) and interacts with regular melodic primes (namely in Lar) (see footnote 8). The diagnostics developed in the present article thus confirm the infamous hermaphrodite nature of tone (Hyman 2011).…”

Section: Scheer E Positional Strength Of Post-coda Consonantssupporting

confidence: 76%

3 x Phonology

Scheer

2022

Can. J. Linguist.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

What does it take to run a full substance-free phonology (SFP)? Because in classical approaches only items below the skeleton have phonetic properties that, according to SFP, need to be expunged, current work in SFP only ever concerns segmental aspects. If substance is removed from segmental representation and primes and computation are therefore arbitrary, the non-trivial question arises: how can such a system communicate with a system where primes and computation are not arbitrary (at and above the skeleton)? The two phonologies below and at / above the skeleton that exist in production are complemented with a third phonology that occurs upon lexicalization, that is, when L1 learners or adults transform the acoustic signal into a stored representation. The core of this article argues that this broad architecture is inhabited by three distinct computational systems along the classical feature geometric divisions: Son(ority) is located at and above the skeleton, while Place and Lar(yngeal) live below the skeleton. The question then is how a multiple-module spell-out works, that is, how ingredients from three distinct vocabularies can be mapped onto a single phonetic item. It is argued that the skeleton plays a central role in this conversion.

show abstract

Section: Scheer E Positional Strength Of Post-coda Consonantssupporting

confidence: 76%

3 x Phonology

Scheer

2022

Can. J. Linguist.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In our experience of tone systems, we know of no fully general tonological rule of this type in any language. Nothing resembles this in any of the surveys of tone (Pike, 1948;Fromkin, 1978;Yip, 2002;Hyman, 2011;Wee, 2019) or in common historical changes affecting tones (Hyman & Schuh, 1974;Hyman, 2007). In the Bantu literature, a phonologically general first-last tone harmony is not found (e.g.…”

Section: Phonological Unnaturalness Of the Alternationmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…At least half the world's languages are tonal (Yip, 2002) and virtually all African tonal languages exhibit something which can be classified as grammatical or morphological tone (Hyman et al, 2021). Tone is also known to be different from other phonological phenomena both quantitatively and qualitatively (Hyman, 2011), as well as computationally (Jardine, 2016). These factors conspire to make tone a ripe area for developing empirically rich yet constrained morphological theories, and ideal grounds for testing them.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Outward-sensitive phonologically-conditioned suppletive allomorphy vs. first-last tone harmony in Cilungu

Rolle

Bickmore

2022

Morphology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We present a case study of grammatical tone allomorphy in Cilungu (Bantu). Tense/Aspect/Mood designations (TAMs) are realized via co-exponence of prefixes, suffixes, and floating tones. In a minority of TAMs, there is allomorphy with the floating tones. For example, in the Recent Past one allomorph involves floating tone targeting the final mora of the stem ("Equation missing") versus one targeting the stem’s second mora ("Equation missing"2). For all such allomorphic TAMs, the alternation is conditioned by the tone of subject agreement markers (SMs) at the left edge of the word. If the SM is high-toned the "Equation missing" variant occurs, but if it is toneless then "Equation missing"2 occurs. We present two competing accounts of these data. Under a morphological account, we posit contextual realizational rules with multiple suppletive exponents conditioned by SM tone. In contrast, under a phonological account a ‘first-last tone harmony’ applies here, morphologically restricted to the context of SMs with a small set of TAMs. Such a harmony rule captures a generalization of these alternations: if the SM is high at the left edge then there is a grammatical high at the right edge, but if the left edge is toneless then grammatical tone does not fall on the right edge. We present several arguments in favor of the morphological analysis (suppletion) over a phonological one (harmony). Specifically, the patterns are not subject to phonological locality, other TAMs involving similar tone patterns are not subject to this harmony, and the proposed first-last tone harmony would be a highly phonologically-unnatural rule with little cross-linguistic support, and exceeding the computational properties of all well-known and established phonological operations. We conclude by discussing a major theoretical implication of the morphological account: this constitutes outward-sensitive phonologically-conditioned suppletive allomorphy, standardly argued to be unattested and/or impossible. Ultimately, we hold that under either account Cilungu presents a novel and important contribution to linguistic theory.

show abstract

“…There can be few or many of them and contrasts will vary in salience. Functionally, they could share the phonological specification of morphemes with vowels and consonants (“lexical tones”) or be their sole exponents (“grammatical tones,” Hyman, 2011 , 2016 ). While the linguistic and cognitive evidence for lexical tone is beyond dispute, as indicated by the results of dichotic listening, categorical perception, ABX designs, and brain response registrations ( Lau et al, 2020 ), the word prosodic systems of many languages continue to escape the categorizations of typologists, with frequent debates about the categorization of tone languages ( Hyman, 2006 ; Kehrein et al, 2017 ; Steien and Yakpo, 2020 ; Gooden, 2022 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because of the more varied complexity of lexical tone systems compared to stress systems, we may reasonably expect the results of a tonal SRT to be affected by relevant features of a language’s phonology ( Best, 2019 ). First, the number of monosyllabic tone melodies may vary from 2 to as many as 9 (e.g., Hyman, 2011 ). A high functional load of lexical pitch contrasts may well affect recall accuracy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Sequence Recall Task and Lexicality of Tone: Exploring Tone “Deafness”

Gussenhoven

Lee-Kim

et al. 2022

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many perception and processing effects of the lexical status of tone have been found in behavioral, psycholinguistic, and neuroscientific research, often pitting varieties of tonal Chinese against non-tonal Germanic languages. While the linguistic and cognitive evidence for lexical tone is therefore beyond dispute, the word prosodic systems of many languages continue to escape the categorizations of typologists. One controversy concerns the existence of a typological class of “pitch accent languages,” another the underlying phonological nature of surface tone contrasts, which in some cases have been claimed to be metrical rather than tonal. We address the question whether the Sequence Recall Task (SRT), which has been shown to discriminate between languages with and without word stress, can distinguish languages with and without lexical tone. Using participants from non-tonal Indonesian, semi-tonal Swedish, and two varieties of tonal Mandarin, we ran SRTs with monosyllabic tonal contrasts to test the hypothesis that high performance in a tonal SRT indicates the lexical status of tone. An additional question concerned the extent to which accuracy scores depended on phonological and phonetic properties of a language’s tone system, like its complexity, the existence of an experimental contrast in a language’s phonology, and the phonetic salience of a contrast. The results suggest that a tonal SRT is not likely to discriminate between tonal and non-tonal languages within a typologically varied group, because of the effects of specific properties of their tone systems. Future research should therefore address the first hypothesis with participants from otherwise similar tonal and non-tonal varieties of the same language, where results from a tonal SRT may make a useful contribution to the typological debate on word prosody.

show abstract

Tone: Is it Different?

Cited by 18 publications

References 75 publications

3 x Phonology

3 x Phonology

Outward-sensitive phonologically-conditioned suppletive allomorphy vs. first-last tone harmony in Cilungu

The Sequence Recall Task and Lexicality of Tone: Exploring Tone “Deafness”

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About