LINGUIST List 13.134

Mon Jan 21 2002

Sum: Head Prominence and Floating Tones

Editor for this issue: Marie Klopfenstein <marielinguistlist.org>

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  • Mike Cahill, head prominence and floating tones

    Message 1: head prominence and floating tones

     Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 13:58:11 -0500
    From: Mike Cahill <mike_cahillsil.org>
    Subject: head prominence and floating tones




    Summary: head prominence and floating tones

    The original questions were: 1) "Floating tones" are abundant in African languages, and have been documented in a number of Mexican languages as well. Does anyone know of their existence in other languages of the world? 2) It seems intuitively obvious that heads of phrases should be more phonetically prominent than non-heads. But does anyone know of cases or actual studies where this has been shown? Or counterexamples?

    This summary, a bit long, I'm afraid, is organized as follows: - Why I sent the queries - Responses about floating tones (4) - Responses about head prominence (12)

    WHY I SENT THE QUERIES I conflate a summary of these because they are related. What prompted my query was the behavior of tonal associative morphemes in African languages. In the 31 languages for which I have data, the associative (possessive, genitive) construction (e.g. 'horse's leg") consists of two adjacent nouns, with a specific tone, usually High, added to one. Underlyingly, it is Noun1 + High tone + Noun2. (The High tone is a remnant of an associative morpheme which had a segmental as well as a tonal component.) The head noun in some languages is Noun1; in other languages it is Noun2. Now in these 31 languages, this High tone morpheme sometimes shows up on Noun1, sometimes on Noun2. Where Noun1 is head, the tone may appear on either Noun1 (13 languages) or Noun2 (11 languages). Where Noun2 is head, the tone appears only on Noun2 (8 languages). (One language has two patterns, so the counts add to 32.) What you never find is that the tone appears on Noun1 if Noun1 is the dependent. So two factors emerge. The tone either goes to the noun that's the head, or it goes rightward. It does not go left to a dependent noun.

    When I presented this at the 1998 LSA, I talked of two constraints: TONE-Right and HEAD-Prominence. My present queries are in pursuit of more information about these patterns. I have received relatively few responses this time about floating tones, but I previously had good support for TONE-Right. However, the responses the past few days about the phonetic prominence of heads showed that heads are generally NOT prominent, and thus I need another explanation for why the associative tone is attracted to head nouns. I speculate a bit on this below. Now on to the responses.

    RESPONSES ON FLOATING TONES

    I admit I wasn't specific enough on this query. My reference to "floating tones" was aimed at morphemes consisting solely of tone, or else a tone connected with one word that is nonetheless pronounced on an adjacent word. Some responses also had this in mind, others didn't. I thank all who responded, and since these are interesting in their own right, I summarize them below (most I've condensed to the essentials).

    Cory Sheedy: Tsuut'ina (also known as Sarcee, Sarsi). There is evidence for a "floating" High tone that triggers regressive upstep and indicates 2nd person singular. This upstep tone is morphemic but it's a little more complicated than that. It only surfaces once the segmental 2SG.SUBJ is deleted by another process. What happens is it raises the preceding tone by one level (low-to-mid or mid-to-high).

    Mark Donohue: They're found in at least the Skou family in New Guinea, where they have L for past tense on verbs, overwriting the lexical tone. The possessive suffixes are formed from the free pronouns with a falling tone imposed on them, except for 3sg.m, which has a high tone. And the dative is made with a change of vowel to [e], and a low tone. This reflects an historical pattern. I think that Kevin Ford has written, in Language and Linguistics in Melanesia, about floating tones in the Goroka languages in PNG. I think, though am not sure, that the same sort of thing happens in Lani. Oh, and the Lakes Plains languages in Irian have tone marking tense/aspect.

    John Coontz: Omaha-Ponca has a system of pitch accent. The accent is normally structured as a HL pattern across the word, with the H being assigned to the first or second syllable and applying to any preceding syllable as well. Subsequent syllables are L. I've noticed enough oddities to think this is at best a first approximation of a description. Anyway, if a word is a monosyllable or disyllable, pronounced in isolation, then the L manifests on the end of the last H syllable, producing a falling pitch. I think the H is fixed to the accented syllable, and the L floats to whatever follows.

    Paul Boersma: Limburgian has a change of tone if one goes from a disyllable to a monosyllable, at least if the intervening consonant is voiced, e.g. dru:HveL 'grapes' ~ dru:HLf 'grape'. At least this is a possible analysis. Underlying forms could be dru:HveLn ~ dru:HveL, respectively, with dropping of final e and n afterwards, and moving of the L of the dropping e to the new final syllable.

    RESPONSES ABOUT HEAD PROMINENCE

    Though there were a few positive responses, most gave examples where the head of a phrase is NOT prominent. (This had been obvious to me about PPs in English from the start.) In terms of the tonal associative morphemes, then, head-prominence is almost certainly not the factor that attracts the High tone to the head. More promising may be head-markedness, and I will probably explore that next. (I welcome correspondence on this.) I do thank all who wrote in; I list their responses below, with some condensing. It's a step toward truth to know when you're mistaken!

    David Odden: I know of counterexamples, in the form of rules which "downgrade" the prosodic properties of the phrasal head, and nothing else. The classical case is Kimatuumbi: "Shorten long vowels in the head of a phrase". There are a number of phrasal rules in languages which shorten vowels, delete high tones, and perhaps other things. Shortening and de-toning "work against" phonetic prominence; then, if there were such a thing as a desire for the head of a phrase to be prominent, you would expect to find a language where phrasal heads *resist* some kind of sandhi. But that does not happen: rather, phrasal heads are specifically sought out as targets of degradation, and as far as I know are *never* specifically immune to degradation.

    Richard Coates: It's not true, is it, that heads are always phonetically prominent (if you mean 'more prominent than other material in the same phrase'), even in English? Only in marked circumstances is P most prominent in PP, V in VP or D in DP.

    Mark Liberman: A counterexample: The verb is usually considered to be the head of the VP, but it is also usually less prosodically prominent than an object NP. In the case of an SO language like English, you could take this to be because the object is later and therefore pragmatically "newer". But I believe that the same thing is roughly true in Japanese, where verbs normally follow objects.

    The usually cited factors in prominence are things like 1. new >> old 2. later >> earlier 3. referential >> anaphoric/cataphoric 4. noun >> verb 5. contentful >> functional There is some literature on what kind of "newness" is relevant (some and not others apparently). When things are equally new (e.g. a string of unrepeated unknown digits) later things tend to be more prominent. Pronoun-like things are usually low in prominence regardless of order. Verbs tend to be low in prominence relative to nouns, other things equal. Functional or grammatical formatives tend to be weak.

    Bill Poser: Yes, I think that Mark is right about Japanese. A typical SOV sentence in Japanese will have just two minor phrases: [S] [OV], with the result that the second phrase, containing the [OV], will have at most a single pitch accent. And since the rule for resolution of pitch accent conflicts at the phrase level is "leftmost wins", if the object is accented its accent survives and that on the verb, if any, is deleted. Another set of counterexamples would come from PPs. Presumably the head of a PP is a P, but adpositions are to my knowledge always little dinky things that are not prominent. The same would be true of DPs, if it is right that what we used to think were NPs are really headed by the determiners.

    Doug Whalen: Cecile Fougeron and Pat Keating have been looking at prosodic strengthening, in which sounds at the onsets of prosodic domains are longer and more "forceful" (have larger movements, etc.). This may be what you want. One reference is below, and it will cite others. FOUGERON, CECILE. 2001. Articulatory properties of initial segments in several prosodic constituents in French. Journal of Phonetics, 29.109-35.

    Philip Carr: Yes, one *would* expect heads of phrases to be perceptually/phonetically more prominent. But if one subscribes to the 'Determiner Phrase' analysis of NPs in English, then at least some determiners are going to be less prominent, qua 'heads', than the noun. PPs in English raise an interesting question: if the P is head, as has been claimed, then they are not normally more salient than the nouns which follow them.

    Peter T. Daniels: Blackbird. I would expect the opposite, because mightn't a head be more likely to be a topic, and a non-head a comment? (as in the compound noun offered, which may or may not qualify as a phrase!)

    Michael Johnstone: I'm not sure, but I think the language I was thinking of that stresses prepositions is Czech.

    Taylor Roberts: One possible counterexample can be seen in Pashto and I expect in other languages with second-position clitics. A clause-initial PP containing a 'full' NP (e.g., 'from the man') is 'heavy' enough to host a second-position clitic. However, if the clause-initial PP instead contains a 'lighter' NP, such as a pronoun (e.g., 'from him'), the PP will not be heavy enough to host the clitic, and the clitic appears further to the right (wherever it finds a heavy- enough host to its left). As the preposition (or postposition) is the head of the PP, its merely being the head of that phrase is obviously not sufficient for it to be prosodically prominent. Your generalization, though, is surely more accurate for 'lexical' categories such as NP and VP. For info on Pashto, see Taylor Roberts, 'The optimal second position in Pashto,' 367-401 in Geert Booij and Jeroen van de Weijer (eds.), _Phonology in Progress - Progress in Phonology: HIL Phonology Papers III_ (The Hague: Holland Academic Graphics).

    Daniel Loehr: In terms of possible counterexamples, Cruttenden (1997), on p. 86 and thereabouts, has a few examples of the intonational nucleus on function words. For example,

    I put my bag in your study because there was nowhere else TO put it. Please make sure you bring all your belongings WITH you.

    Not being a syntactician, I can't speculate on whether TO and WITH in the above examples are heads (of the infinitival clause, and of the prepositional clause, respectively). Cruttenden, Alan (1997) Intonation, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press.

    Paul Boersma: Whether the language is object-verb or verb-object, it seems to be the object that is stressed in at least 90% of the cases.

    Alex Monaghan: an interesting notion, but i don't see why it's intuitive that heads of (syntactic? semantic?) phrases should be prominent. firstly, if the same information were encoded at every linguistic level that would be massively redundant - even more redundant than language already is. secondly, since syn/sem heads are not generally marked at other levels of linguistic structure (morphology, syllabification, etc.), why should they be marked in prosody? thirdly, there is a great deal of evidence - all the way back to SPE - that syntax and prosody are not generally congruent, so syntactic heads will not generally be prosodic heads.

    i can think of two excellent reasons why syntactic/semantic heads will not coincide with prosodic heads: 1 - one major function of prosody is to encode the phrase- level structure of speech. to this end, many languages have regularly right-headed or left-headed prosody. french is a classic example. this makes the phrases easy to identify, but makes it difficult for syn/sem heads to coincide with prosodic heads unless the former are similarly constrained. 2 - another major function of prosody is to distinguish between supposedly "new" and "given" information. unless syn/sem heads are always presented as "new", they will not be prosodic heads: thus, in an english sentence such as "John bought a red jeep, and Mary bought a yellow jeep.", it would be extremely odd to put particular prominence on either occurrence of "jeep" because it is the "given" part of the meaning.

    for a longer discussion of the factors determining prosodic prominence, see my article "What Determines Accentuation?" in Journal of Pragmatics 19 (1993) pp.559-584 (an online version is available at http://www.compapp.dcu.ie/~alex/PUB/prepositions.ps

    Mike Cahill Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International)