The Tonemes of Mesquital Otomi

Sinclair, Donald E.; Pike, Kenneth L.

doi:10.1086/463988

Cited by 3 publications

(32 citation statements)

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“…However, it is likely to be the case that there are tone sandhi or intonational processes influencing the tonal patterns at the phrasal level. A closer examination of the individual bisyllables in the example sentences and citation forms provided by Sinclair & Pike (1948) reveals a striking pattern in the syllable tonotactics: the vast majority of bisyllabic words (89%) end with a high tone, and very few with low (9%) or rising (2%) tones. This pattern suggests that the tonal melodies observed are not necessarily as free as Sinclair & Pike (1948) suggested.…”

Section: Tone In Otomimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A closer examination of the individual bisyllables in the example sentences and citation forms provided by Sinclair & Pike (1948) reveals a striking pattern in the syllable tonotactics: the vast majority of bisyllabic words (89%) end with a high tone, and very few with low (9%) or rising (2%) tones. This pattern suggests that the tonal melodies observed are not necessarily as free as Sinclair & Pike (1948) suggested. Sinclair & Pike's (1948) tonal analysis has become the received view in modern work on other varieties of Otomi, with most researchers positing three tones with limited or no restrictions on placement.…”

Section: Tone In Otomimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In fact, the majority of work on Otomi prosody either predates the development of this approach or is not couched in a formal framework. The tonal description of Otomi is typified by Sinclair & Pike's (1948) account of Mezquital Otomi, of the northern dialect region. Three phonological tones are posited -high, low, and rising -each of which can appear in any position in a word.…”

Section: Tone In Otomimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Each syllable bears a tone, and there are no restrictions on what tones can follow one another. Sinclair and Pike (1948) reported that all three tones occurred with nearly all vowel phonemes, 4 and that the tones are not subject to any restrictions with regards their linear ordering within lexemes. Sinclair & Pike (1948) made passing reference to some phrasal phenomena, such that phrases tend to end with a high tone (suggesting, in modern parlance, a high boundary tone at phrase edges), and some lexical sandhi phenomena, noting that certain affixes can alter the immediately preceding lexical tone.…”

Section: Tone In Otomimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, their description is brief and does not provide many details. Sinclair & Pike (1948) also provided the example sentences in (2), which show 'all possible sequence combinations in two adjacent syllables' (p. 93). 5 (2) a. rà déhé dícǐhě dè gá zàbí 'the water which we drink is from a pool' b. rà zàbíšà bíxà yǎbə' the pool is very distant'…”

Section: Tone In Otomimentioning

confidence: 99%

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The phonetics and phonology of lexical prosody in San Jerónimo Acazulco Otomi

Turnbull

2016

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

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San Jerónimo Acazulco Otomi (SJAO) is an underdescribed and endangered Oto-Manguean language spoken in central Mexico. This paper provides an analysis of the phonology of tonal contrasts in SJAO and the phonetics of their realization based on pitch pattern data derived from audio recordings of citation forms of SJAO words. Each SJAO lexical word has one and only one tonal sequence – either /H/ or /HL/. This sequence is underlyingly associated with one syllable in the word. Other syllables are not specified for tone, and their phonetic realization is predictable depending on their position relative to the tonal syllable. A phonetic analysis revealed that underlyingly-tonal syllables are phonetically distinct from non-tonal syllables: those with /H/ are produced with greater vocal effort (measured by spectral tilt), and those with /HL/ are longer, louder, and bear a higher f0 (fundamental frequency), compared with non-tonal syllables. This analysis differs from previous accounts of lexical prosody in other Otomi varieties, which have either described a three-way system of high, low, and rising tones contrasting on every stem syllable, or a system where one syllable per word is assigned a stress-like ‘accent’. This difference from previous analyses suggests that there is a third possible characterization of lexical prosody for Otomi, which is appropriate for SJAO and potentially other understudied varieties.

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Section: Tone In Otomimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Tone In Otomimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Tone In Otomimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Tone In Otomimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Tone In Otomimentioning

confidence: 99%

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The phonetics and phonology of lexical prosody in San Jerónimo Acazulco Otomi

Turnbull

2016

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

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The vowel system of Santiago Mexquititlán Otomi (Hñäñho)

Mulík¹,

Amengual²,

Avecilla-Ramírez³

et al. 2021

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

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The present study provides an acoustic description of the vowel system of Santiago Mexquititlán Otomi (Hñäñho), an endangered and understudied Oto-Manguean language variety spoken in central Mexico. The goal of this production study was to determine whether the phonemic contrasts between Hñäñho vowels, as previously described impressionistically, are maintained in the acoustic realizations of a group of relatively balanced bilingual native speakers of Hñäñho or if Hñäñho phonemic categories are merging due to the extensive influence of Spanish. To this end, each Hñäñho speaker recorded a carefully designed list of 90 Hñäñho words and the resulting dataset of a total of 1507 tokens was subjected to analysis. Linear mixed-effects models were constructed to predict Bark scale correlates of vowel height (B1 – b0) and vowel frontness/backness (B2 – B1) and the Pillai scores were calculated in order to determine the degree of overlap for adjacent Hñäñho vowel pairs. The speakers’ Hñäñho vowels were also compared to their Spanish vowels. A list of five Spanish words was used and a total of 90 tokens of the Spanish vowels were recorded. The results confirm that the vowel system of Hñäñho, produced by older Hñäñho speakers, consists of 10 distinct phonemes. Hñäñho-specific phonetic details are discussed, including the fronted realization of the vowel /u/ as [u̟] and the lowering of the vowel /ɔ/ to [ɒ], which might lead to a future /a – ɔ/ merger. These findings underline the importance of early and sustained exposure to indigenous bilinguals’ native language for the maintenance of phonetic features of Hñäñho despite extensive contact with Spanish.

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Disentangling the Effects of Position and Utterance-Level Declination on the Production of Complex Tones in Yoloxóchitl Mixtec

DiCanio¹,

Benn

García

2020

Lang Speech

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Phrase-final position is cross-linguistically the locus of both processes of phonetic reduction and processes of phonetic enhancement. In tone languages, phrasal position is a conditioning environment for processes of tone sandhi/allotony, though such patterns emerge from local processes of tonal enhancement or reduction. The current article examines the production of tone in Yoloxóchitl Mixtec, an endangered language of Mexico with nine lexical tones and fixed, stem-final stress, across phrasal and utterance positions via three experiments. In the first two experiments, the findings show that speakers lengthen syllables and expand the tonal F0 range in utterance-final position. The effect of this range expansion is high tone raising, low tone lowering, and falling contour lowering. Rising contour tones undergo substantial leveling when produced in a non-utterance-final context, similar to Taiwanese Mandarin. These findings suggest that postural changes in F0 range are controlled, intonational effects in tonal languages and not paralinguistic. In the third experiment, we examine utterance-level declination and raising within sentences consisting entirely of level tones. We show that utterance-level F0 changes are independent from local tonal hyperarticulation effects in phrase-final position. Together, the experiments largely support prosodically-conditioned phonetic undershoot as a control mechanism in tone production and demonstrate how tonal complexity may constrain universal tendencies in speech production.

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The Tonemes of Mesquital Otomi

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

The phonetics and phonology of lexical prosody in San Jerónimo Acazulco Otomi

The phonetics and phonology of lexical prosody in San Jerónimo Acazulco Otomi

The vowel system of Santiago Mexquititlán Otomi (Hñäñho)

Disentangling the Effects of Position and Utterance-Level Declination on the Production of Complex Tones in Yoloxóchitl Mixtec

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