High tone in Moro: effects of prosodic categories and morphological domains

Abstract

This paper presents a description and analysis of the tonal system of Moro, a Kordofanian language of Sudan, showing that the distribution of H(igh) tone is sensitive to a number of morphological and prosodic factors. First, we demonstrate that the distribution of H on nouns is sensitive to the OCP, both within roots and with affixes. Nouns also exhibit lexical distinctions between forms that exhibit unbounded rightward spreading of H and those that show no spreading. We model this distinction using cophonologies. While the distribution of H on Moro verb stems bears someWe are immensely grateful to our Moro speakers, Elyasir Julima and Ikhlas Elahmer, for sharing their language with us. We thank audiences at the 45 th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, the Annual Conference on African Linguistics 37 and 40, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Florida, the University of California, Santa Barbara and Harvard University for useful feedback and comments. We appreciate in-depth comments and discussion from Eric Baković, Larry Hyman, Victor Manfredi, Andrew Nevins, David Odden, and participants in the San Diego Phonology Interest Group and UCSD Phonetics Laboratory meetings. The members of the Moro Language Project, particularly Farrell Ackerman and George Gibbard, helped in numerous, immeasurable ways in both checking the data and refining the analysis. Finally, two anonymous reviewers and the associate editors, Michael Kenstowicz and Junko Itô, provided us with challenging comments and advice for improving the paper, for which we are grateful. Portions of Sect. 4 of this paper will appear with a slightly different analysis under the title 'Syllable weight and high tone in Moro' in Proceedings from the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 45. This material is based upon research supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0745973 'Moro Language Project'. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF). P. Jenks ( ) Department of Linguistics, Harvard University, 3rd Floor, Boylston Hall, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA e-mail: pjenks@fas.harvard.edu S. Rose Department of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive #108, La Jolla, CA 92093-0108, USA e-mail: rose@ling.ucsd.edu 212 P. Jenks, S. Rose similarities to nouns, crucial differences emerge. Rightward H tone spreading is binary on verbs, and sensitive to the weight of the syllable in terms of both the presence of an onset and a coda. We model this effect as H tone spreading within a binary foot. Furthermore, unlike nouns, underlying representations play little role in the distribution of H on verb roots. H tone is predictably distributed within a morphological category, the derived stem (D-stem), similar to a constituent recognized in Bantu languages (e.g. Downing 2000). Finally, we analyze competition between H associated with ...

Cophonologies by Ph(r)ase

“…6 Returning to Moro, recall that the cophonologies specified in (16) scope over the verb stem (1), but not over the pre-verb (2). One might be tempted to view the boundary between preverb and verb-stem as an arbitrary morphological division, and it is treated as such by Jenks and Rose (2011), reminiscent of the distinction between stem and word in lexical phonology and morphology (Kiparsky et al 1982) and its OT-decendants (Kiparsky 2000;Bermúdez-Otero 2008). However, there is evidence that this boundary is syntactic, where the verb stem is the portion of the verb which originates inside of the vP phase while the preverb originates in T or higher heads, as schematized below for a few verb forms: We further adopt the idea that the final vowel suffix is the v head (Jenks and Rose 2015), as in (16).…”

“…Inkelas 2014 for a recent overview). For example, in Moro (Kordofanian: Sudan), a left-aligned high tone is epenthesized on all verb stems (in brackets), but only in certain inflectional categories of the verb (Jenks and Rose 2011). In (1), this tone occurs on the leftmost syllable, underlined, of imperfective verbs stems (1a), but not in perfective verbs such as (1b).…”

“…This will be clarified below. We have also eliminated all of the constraints which require that this H be associated with a left-aligned bimoraic foot, for which seeJenks and Rose (2011).…”

Symmetrical objects in Moro: Challenges and solutions

“…The structure of the verb is of particular relevance to the phenomena under discussion. We will assume, following Jenks & Rose (2011, 2015, the Moro verb template in (1) Finally, a two-tone phonological system distinguishes morphosyntactic properties, with few instances of lexical tone contrasts (Jenks & Rose 2011, 2015. Several of these characteristics will be evident in the data below.…”

“…The structure of the verb is of particular relevance to the phenomena under discussion. We will assume, following Jenks & Rose (2011, 2015), the Moro verb template in (1): [5]…”