A corpus‐based description of Kakabe, a Western Mande language: prosody in grammar (original) (raw)

Grammar and prosody in Dalabon and Kayardild

2011

This dissertation presents a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the interaction between grammatical structure and prosodic structure in two Australian languages, Dalabon and Kayardild. The typological profiles of these languages contrast dramatically: Dalabon is an extreme head-marking polysynthetic language, in which a single verb can carry all of the information typically associated with a clause in a language like English (e.g. M. Baker, 1996; Evans & Sasse, 2002). Kayardild is an extreme dependent-marking language, with syntactic relationships encoded on nominal dependents through sequences of case morphology (Dench & Evans, 1988; Evans, 1995a; Nordlinger, 1998). One of the main motivations for studying the interaction between grammatical structure and prosodic constituency in two grammatically distinct languages is that a comparison will potentially test the effects that grammatical structure may have on prosody. By examining two structurally different languages it then becomes possible to test certain hypotheses regarding the grammatical influence on prosodic structure. Whether an extreme dependent-marking language and an extreme head-marking language show similar or different prosodic structural patterns may either support or disprove statements regarding the universality of the interaction between prosodic and grammatical structure. This dissertation presents both quantitative and qualitative findings, based on approximately 75 minutes of recorded Dalabon and Kayardild narratives. The hypotheses examined in this dissertation concern whether factors such as grammatical complexity, the location of clause boundaries, discourse effects such as the introduction of new information, as well as prosodic length, affect prosodic constituency boundary location and strength, irrespective of the language type in question. Although the two languages differ dramatically in their grammatical structures, the overall interaction between prosody and the various grammatical factors may be expected to show similar patterns. In order to test these hypotheses, the relationships between grammatical complexity and prosodic constituency, between the clause and prosodic constituency, and between prosodic length and prosodic constituency are examined. The results presented here show that there is a large amount of consistency across both languages in terms of the prosodic phrasing of clauses overall, supporting the view that prosodic structure is independent of grammatical structure. However, the results also show there is interesting variation in the prosodic phrasing of constituents within the clause as well as overall pausing patterns, suggesting that typological structure does have a role to play in prosodic structure.

Formalizing the prosodic word domain in Bambara tonology

2013

The surface tonal melodies associated with Compacité Tonale (CT) are known in the Manding literature, however no formal mechanism linking these melodies to the phonological structure of these languages has yet been offered. It is argued in this paper that, for Bambara, the observed tonal outcomes of CT are directly linked to prosodic structure above the level of the syllable. That is, tone spreading via this process is bounded and constrained by the prosodic word (PW) domain. This paper aims to offer a principled explanation for both the regular and irregular tonal outcomes of CT in terms of the (in)ability for tone spreading to occur within the PW domain, rather than within some other morphosyntactic entity. A role for the PW domain as a domain of application for phonological processes in Bambara draws on earlier work that has characterized and offered evidence for foot structure in the language (e.g. Green 2010; Green and Diakite 2008; Leben 2002, 2003). This paper draws on Prosodic Projection Theory (e.g. Ito and Mester 2007, 2009, 2010, 2013) to illustrate that CT is triggered by rightward adjunction to the PW maximal projection, followed by tone spreading within the leftmost non-maximal PW domain immediately dominated by the maximal projection.