This paper examines the cues for and interaction between the metrical and tonal systems of Kera. Kera has no word-level stress, but the heads of its quantitysensitive iambic feet are cued by duration, intensity and vowel allophony ; in addition, foot boundaries are identified by vowel-harmony and tone-spreading domains. The tonal system has three underlying tones, which are enhanced by differences in voice onset time (VOT). Kera demonstrates an interaction between the iambic foot and tone. Words have one or two tones. For words of three or more syllables the tone-bearing unit is the foot, but for shorter words it is the syllable. This dichotomy is accounted for by a faithfulness constraint requiring all tones to surface, which overrides a constraint limiting each foot to one tone. Kera shows that a tonal system can be sensitive to metrical structure, while maintaining a certain independence between the two systems.
The reduction of vowels is a popular topic for research, but little has been said about the effects of vowel harmony on vowel reduction. Gendrot and Adda-Decker (2006, 2007) claim that phonetic reduction is linked to the phonetic duration of the vowel so that in short syllables, the vowel converges towards a schwa-like quality. I support this claim in general, but I add the claim that reduction is blocked in vowel harmony domains. Within a harmony domain, even in vowels of short duration, the quality of the vowel retains the quality of the feature which is spreading. This paper demonstrates this with data from Kera, a Chadic language spoken in Chad. I examine fronting, rounding, and height harmony in Kera and confirm the fact that harmony (but not accidental agreement) in some way blocks the reduction. This has implications for the role of harmony and claims concerning privative features. Keywords: phonology; reduction; Kera; vowel harmony; acoustic; formants; duration; blocking; privative
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