Tonal and Non-Tonal Intonation in Shekgalagari

Abstract

The study of intonation in a (fully) tone language presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to see how a language which exploits F0 mainly for the purpose of lexical and grammatical contrasts succeeds in encoding the functions often expressed by means of intonation in non-tonal languages. As is well-known, word-level distinctions can be quite rich in tone systems, which contrast up to five pitch levels and a dozen or more tonal contours or clusters, e.g. Wobe (Kru; Liberia) (Bearth & Link 1980, Singler 1984. Word-level tones, in turn, can be subject to considerable manipulation by the postlexical phonology, where juxtaposition, syntactic conditioning, or phonological phrasing can modify the word-level inputs and introduce additional pitch features, e.g. the phonological phrase-final H% boundary tone of Kinande (Bantu; Democratic Republic of the Congo) (Hyman 1990). Particularly when tone systems are complex in these ways, the question is how there can be much room left for intonation to modify or add pitch specifications without obscuring the word-level tonal contrasts. The goal of this paper is to examine how Shekgalagari (Bantu; Botswana, Namibia), a language which exploits F0 mainly for the purpose of lexical and grammatical contrasts, succeeds in encoding the functions often expressed by means of intonational phonology in non-tonal languages. Whereas other languages with lexical tone adopt different strategies for incorporating intonational pitch features, we demonstrate that most of the intonational marking is non-tonal in Shekgalagari, thereby raising the question of what is a possible intonational system.

Intonational Differences between L1 and L2 English in South Africa

“…So far, we have limited our analyses to a perceptual evaluation of utterances that were elicited in different contexts, which gave us a first indication of the resemblances and differences in the use of intonational features. Obviously, it would make sense to see whether similar use of functions has different formal correlates, and whether there could be other traces of the L2 languages which are not discernible through the perceptual tests we have conducted now [see Hyman and Monaka, 2008 for non-F0-based intonation in Shekgalagadi]. It would also be worthwhile to explore if the differences in English intonation with respect to the marking of information structure are perceived and if so, how they are interpreted pragmatically.…”

“…If an utterance ends on a high pitch due to it being a question or indicating continuation, the speaker will anticipate this rise and will produce preceding tones in a slightly adapted way so that there is 'no strongly marked ascent in tonal steps' discernible. Recent research by Hyman and Monaka [2008] on Shekgalagadi (a Sotho-Tswana language of Botswana) has shown a richness of non-pitch-based intonation, such as the absence of penultimate lengthening for the internal members of paused lists, which undergo final lengthening instead [Hyman and Monaka, 2008, p. 277].…”

(In)variability in the Samoan syntax/prosody interface and consequences for syntactic parsing

“…This raises the issue that the syntactically conditioned H-tones expected in these configurations may be co-occurring or may have been 'overridden' by a different kind of high edge tone, one that demarcates a prosodic domain, see e.g., S.-A. Jun (1996, p. 38), Khan (2008, p. 119), Hyman and Monaka (2011). If so, then an alternative transcription of the high edge tones followed by pauses that we have transcribed with 'H-' in Figure 6 might be 'H%,' as '%' is a diacritic standardly used for indicating association to an 'intonational phrase' boundary in autosegmental-metrical 20 As noted in the previous section, while the ergative case marking is the segmental /e/ in tautala lelei, in tautala leaga, that case marker is usually dropped.…”

Developments in the Study of Intonational Typology

“…Other than that, the language’s intonation is non‐tonal (i.e. not based on F0), involving lengthening of the penultimate syllable, final lengthening, and final devoicing (Hyman and Monaka 2008).…”