Pitch Accent Alignment in Romance: Primary and Secondary Associations with Metrical Structure

Abstract

The article describes the contrastive possibilities of alignment of high accents in three Romance varieties, namely, Central Catalan, Neapolitan Italian, and Pisa Italian. The Romance languages analyzed in this article provide crucial evidence that small differences in alignment in rising accents should be encoded phonologically. To account for such facts within the AM model, the article develops the notion of "phonological anchoring" as an extension of the concept of secondary association originally proposed by Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988), and later adopted by Grice (1995), Grice, Ladd, and Arvaniti (2000), and others to explain the behavior of edge tones. The Romance data represent evidence that not only peripheral edge tones seek secondary associations. We claim that the phonological representation of pitch accents should include two independent mechanisms to encode alignment properties with metrical structure: (1) encoding of the primary phonological association (or affiliation) between the tone and its tone-bearing unit; and (2), for some specific cases, encoding of the secondary phonological anchoring of tones to prosodic edges (moras, syllables, and prosodic words). The Romance data described in the article provide crucial evidence of mora-edge, syllable-edge, and word-edge H tonal associations.

Tonal alignment is contrastive in falling contours in Dinka

“…For a tone target within a syllable with a long (bimoraic) vowel, their model provides the possible docking sites in 14: a tone can be linked with either edge of the syllable or of the moras within it (Prieto et al 2005:373ff.). (14) T Prieto et al 2005 andMorén &Zsiga 2006 expands the set of possible patterns of association, so that one mora offers two points of association rather than just one. Applied to Dinka, this enables us to represent the two falling tone patterns as in 15.…”

“…This consideration is also part of the argument against a representation with reference to mora edges, which allows for three or more levels of contrast (e.g. Prieto et al 2005). Finally, the location of the category boundary in Dinka, within the first 30 ms of the vowel, is in line with the model of House 1990.…”

The relevance of prosodic structure in tonal articulation Edge effects at the prosodic word level in Catalan and Spanish

“…The sample utterances are the broad focus utterances li venen mandarines [li «bEn´m m´n5 d´»Rin´s] (Catalan) and le venden mandarinas [le «ben5 den man5 da»Rinas] (Spanish) 'They sell tangerines to him/her'. Following the proposal by Prieto, D'Imperio and Gili-Fivela (2005), the tonal transcription of the utterance would correspond to one prenuclear accent L+>H* followed by the nuclear accent !H* and by the boundary tone L%. 4 The lack of systematic alignment between H and the end of the word was attested by inspecting the target utterances.…”

The Effect of Focus and Phrase Position on East Norwegian Lexical Tonal Accents

“…Work by Prieto et al (2005), Morén andZsiga (2006), andRemijsen (2013) shows analyses of languages (with and without lexical tone) where a tone can be linked with either edge of the tone-bearing unit, thus distinguishing the same tonal sequence through alignment differences. Kristoffersen (2000) interprets similar results for East Norwegian as the L tone in accent 1, and the H tone in accent 2, linking with the Effect of Focus and Position on Norwegian Accent stressed syllable.…”