The Phonetics and Phonology of "Definitive Accent" in Tongan

Anderson, Victoria B.; Otsuka, Yuko

doi:10.1353/ol.2006.0002

Cited by 19 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Careful phonetic studies have shown that, despite the name, this does not involve pitch features but rather doubling of the final mora in the last word of the noun phrase (Taumoefolau 2002;Salisbury 2002;Anderson & Otsuka 2006;van Ryn 2013). This is therefore not a tonal morphological feature, but more akin to reduplication.…”

Section: Do H-tones Mark Xps?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Exclusives, equatives and prosodic phrases in Samoan

Calhoun

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper investigates the functions of prosodic phrasing in the Austronesian VSO language Samoan. Two types of sentences are investigated, exclusives (involving the particle na'o 'only') and equatives. Two complementary methodologies were used, a production study and an acceptability judgment study, to examine the prosodic realisation and relative naturalness of different word orderings of the two sentence types. The particle na'o has an unusual distribution: preceding the initial constituent, be it the verb or a fronted noun phrase; or following the verb, but only modifying the absolutive (object). It was found that post-verbal absolutives modified by na'o are usually not preceded by a phrase boundary, unlike unmodified absolutives which are consistently preceded by a high phrase tone (H-) (cf. Yu 2009). Equatives in Samoan involve clauses which are the juxtaposition of two noun phrases, one the rheme (focus) and the other the theme (topic). It was found that rhemes are usually followed by a phrase break, while for themes this is optional. Rheme-theme order was strongly preferred to theme-rheme order. These findings are argued to show a close relationship between information structure, constituent ordering and prosodic phrasing in Samoan. The preferred order of constituents in Samoan is rheme-theme, with a high phrase tone marking the end of the rheme. The absolutive argument is strongly preferred to be at the start of the theme.

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Section: Do H-tones Mark Xps?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Exclusives, equatives and prosodic phrases in Samoan

Calhoun

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…Section 5 deals with vowel length, which is analyzed and transcribed two different ways in the literature. Tongan can be analyzed as having either a contrast between short and long vowels (Churchward 1953, Poser 1985, or sequences of vowels, in separate syllables, that sometimes happen to be identical (Feldman 1978, Schütz 2001, Taumoefolau 2002, Anderson & Otsuka 2006. The examples in (2) show transcriptions under each view.…”

Section: Tongan Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Non-native contrasts in Tongan loans

2019

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We present three case studies of marginal contrasts in Tongan loans from English, working with data from three speakers. Although Tongan lacks contrasts in stress or in CC vs. CVC sequences, secondary stress in loans is contrastive, and is sensitive to whether a vowel has a correspondent in the English source word; vowel deletion is also sensitive to whether a vowel is epenthetic as compared to the English source; and final vowel length is sensitive to whether the penultimate vowel is epenthetic, and if not, whether it corresponds to a stressed or unstressed vowel in the English source. We provide an analysis in the multilevel model of Boersma (1998) and Boersma & Hamann (2009), and show that the loan patterns can be captured using only constraints that plausibly are needed for native-word phonology, including constraints that reflect perceptual strategies.

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“…In addition to their syntactic properties, these Dems have clear effects in the phonology as well. Tongan word-level primary stress is calculated based on a right-aligned trochaic foot 10 -the prosodic word's primary stress falls on its penultimate vowel (Taumoefolau 2002;Anderson & Otsuka 2006;Kuo & Vicenik 2012;Garellek & White 2015). As such, when the phonology builds these right-aligned trochaic feet, a given prosodic word such as fo'ou is assigned a prosodic structure in (4).…”

Section: Demonstrative Encliticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The phonetic literature offers insight to help decide between these analyses with its explorations of the length of final vowels with and without the DefAcc (e.g., Anderson & Otsuka 2006;White 2010). The finding is that the length of vowels with DefAcc, like the final [u] in (7b), are shown to be about 110ms longer than a final [u] without the DefAcc, as in (7a).…”

Section: The Definitive Accentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Syntax-phonology mapping and the Tongan DP

Ahn

2016

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Tongan, a Polynesian language, is almost entirely head-initial. There are some exceptions to this, including Demonstrative enclitics and the so-called Definitive Accent (Churchward 1953), which appears to be a stress-shift operation, typically in the rightmost word of the DP.* One question that arises here is: where does the morphophonological status of being an enclitic come fromparticularly in a rather radically head-initial language? By investigating the distributional properties of the Definitive Accent, it will become clear that this is the result of syntactic and phonological structures proceeding without any direct appeal to morphophonological properties. A new formal analysis presented here derives the positions of the Definitive Accent and possible prosodic phrasings, appealing to independently motivated phonological constraints applying to structures with three cross-linguistically supported movement operations. It is shown that achieving this requires neither including morpheme-indexed constraints, nor having lexemes pre-specified with morphophonological properties such as "enclitic" or "prefix". Finally, Tongan Definitive Accents raise important issues about the immutability of phases. Specifically, it must be that Phonology may access and manipulate previously spelled out material in a way that Syntax cannot, which is in fact exactly what a Minimalist architecture predicts.

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The Phonetics and Phonology of "Definitive Accent" in Tongan

Cited by 19 publications

References 2 publications

Exclusives, equatives and prosodic phrases in Samoan

Exclusives, equatives and prosodic phrases in Samoan

Non-native contrasts in Tongan loans

Syntax-phonology mapping and the Tongan DP

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