Towards a phonological model of Uyghur intonation

Abstract

In this paper we present a preliminary intonational model for Uyghur (Turkic: China). We use acoustic measurements to support the claim that Uyghur is a stress language that only uses edge-marking intonation. Although this is not unattested in the literature, to our knowledge this is the first AM model of such a language.

Issues in Uyghur phonology

“…A series of production and perception experiments in Yakup (2013) and Yakup and Sereno (2016) suggests that lexical stress does exist, but is reflected only by increases in duration: however, Uyghur speakers frequently disagreed as to which syllables were stressed in many words. Major and Mayer (2018, to appear) reproduce and expand on these results, suggesting that phrasal prosody is responsible for pitch contours that have previously been attributed to stress. It is clear that Uyghur speakers perceive certain vowels as longer than others, but it is unclear whether this should be analysed as underlying vowel length or lexically‐specified stress (or both) 9…”

“…There has been limited phonetic evidence brought to bear on the question of vowel reduction specifically (though see McCollum, 2020). Assuming a description of Uyghur stress that is broadly consistent with a number of existing papers (Major & Mayer, 2018, to appear; McCollum, 2020; Özçelik, 2015; Yakup, 2013; Yakup & Sereno, 2016), the relationship between vowel reduction and stress might be characterised according to the following properties: Closed syllables and stressed syllables are heavy. Open syllables are light. Initial and final syllables are both stressed by default. Certain roots are lexically specified for stress position.…”

“…Finally, although we focus on segmental phonology here, we note that there have been a number of theoretical contributions to other topics in Uyghur, such as intonational phonology (Major & Mayer, 2018, to appear), the syntax and semantics of indexical shift (Major, to appear; Major & Mayer, 2019; Shklovsky & Sudo, 2014), embedded clauses and complementation (Major, 2021; Major, resubmitted; Sugar, 2019), and auxiliary verbs (McKenzie et al., 2018).…”

Prominence and intonation in Singapore English

“…If correct, this analysis suggests that SgE can be added to the purportedly rare class of languages that have been characterized as possessing lexical word stress but without pitch accents on stressed syllables. For languages like Kuot (Lindström & Remijsen 2005), Wolof (Rialland & Robert 2001), Uyghur (Major & Mayer 2018), and according to some studies, certain varieties of Indonesian (van Zanten & ven Heuven 1998, van Zanten et al 2003, f0 has been analyzed as only performing an edge-marking function, with no evidence for post-lexical pitch accents associated to stressed syllables (see Gordon (2014), Roettger & Gordon (2017) for a discussion on disentangling word-level stress from pitch movements attributable to phrasal units larger than a word).…”

Revisiting the Syntax of Monsters in Uyghur

“…One final piece of novel evidence in favor of accusative subjects raising into the matrix clause comes from prosodic phrasing. The model of Uyghur intonation that I assume is from Major and Mayer (2018). The explicit discussion of Uyghur indexical shift and its prosodic/intonational correlates can be found in Major and Mayer (2019).…”