A Subsegmental Correspondence Approach to Contour Tone (Dis)Harmony Patterns

Abstract

<p>Contour tones, like contour segments, exhibit dualist syntagmatic behavior: as whole units, <span style="font-size: 10px;">they can participate in harmony (spreading) and disharmony (OCP-type restriction) processes </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">or their internal, subsegmental components may act independently. Formally, such schizoid </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">behavior from both contour tones and segments in (dis)harmony patterns has challenged </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">previous phonological theory. As a solution, this paper presents a novel, quantized phonological </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">representation for subsegmental units couched in existing surface correspondence theory </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">(Agreement by Correspondence (ABC); Hansson 2001; Rose & Walker 2004; et seq.). The </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">resulting approach, termed ABC+Q, treats tonally contoured segments as strings of tonally </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">simplex subsegments and is thus capable of modeling both whole contour (segment-level) </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">and partial contour (subsegment-level) effects as consequences of (dis)agreement triggered by </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">phonological similarity and proximity. Such an approach makes it possible for the first time </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">to offer a united treatment for the behavior of both contour tones and contour segments across </span><span style="font-size: 10px;">observed patterns of (dis)harmony.</span></p>

Looking into Segments

“…The focus of the examples in this section is assimilation, and the analytical framework used is that of Agreement by Correspondence (ABC) Theory. The combination of Q Theory and ABC is termed 'ABC+Q' (Shih & Inkelas 2014, Inkelas & Shih 2016. We begin with a brief overview of ABC.…”

“…ABC analyses rely on (CORR)espondence and (IDENT)ity constraints. Influenced by Hansson (2007) and Rhodes (2012), we assume a version of ABC in which correspondence is local and pairwise, applying to consecutive qualifying elements only (Shih & Inkelas 2014). Each CORR constraint establishes similarity conditions and compels the closest pair of such segments meeting those conditions to correspond.…”

“…However, ABC has since been extended to vowel harmony (Sasa 2009;Rhodes 2012;Walker 2015;a.o. ) and to tone and consonant tone interactions (Shih 2013, Shih & Inkelas 2014. We thus use the term CORR-XX and IDENT-XX for the relevant constraints, where 'X' ranges over any type of unit, e.g., consonants and vowels.…”

“…Q Theory owes major intellectual debts to predecessors such as Aperture Theory (Steriade 1993(Steriade , 1994 as well as Autosegmental Theory and Articulatory Phonology, mentioned above. Building on earlier work on Q Theory (Shih & Inkelas 2014, Inkelas & Shih 2016, this paper will explore the applicability of Q Theory in four areas: the encoding of subsegmental contrasts within a language (Section 3), the role subsegments can play in the kinds of phonological correspondences that are used to model segmental interactions within a word (Sections 4 and 5), the internal makeup of Q segments (Section 6), and the ability for segment-based Optimality-Theoretic models of grammar to capture the kinds of insights regarding gestural coordination and overlap that drive Articulatory Phonology (Section 7).…”

A Q-theoretic approach to distinctive subsegmental timing

“…This paper presents two case studies of segment-internal timing distinctions which motivate Q Theory, in which each segment (Q) is represented as a string of featurally uniform subsegments (q), e.g. (q1 q2 q3), corresponding to the informal concepts of onset, target, and offset (Inkelas & Shih 2013, 2016, 2017, Shih & Inkelas 2014. We argue, based on Panará and Hungarian, that this representational richness is motivated by the need to represent phonologically tripartite segments, as well as segment-internal timing distinctions that are phonologically contrastive.…”