Intonation
Postlexical tonal events are characterised by a large amount of variability. Grice et al. (2015) and Roettger and Grice (2015) showed that both questions (polar and echo questions) and contrastive statements are characterized by a rise to a F0 peak followed by a fall on the final/contrasted word. Most importantly, the location of the F0 peak within the word was variable in both sentence modalities, occurring either on the penultimate or final syllable. F0 peak location was probabilistically determined by competing factors: There was a preference for peaks to be located on more sonorous elements and on heavy syllables. Moreover, questions revealed a stronger tendency to have the F0 peak on the final syllable. Despite these probabilistic tendencies, tonal placement was to some degree freely alternating, since the same speaker often produced both penultimate and final F0 peaks in different repetitions of the same target word. This kind of ‘free’ alternation was subsequently confirmed perceptually: Tashlhiyt listeners are strikingly indifferent to the position of F0 peaks (Roettger & Grice 2015). Our interpretation of these findings is that the location of postlexical prominence cannot be predicted based on lexical structure.
A different kind of variability was observed in question words (wh-words) (Bruggeman et al., 2017). When they occur in canonical, phrase-initial position they are marked by a rise-fall pitch contour. The location of the absolute F0 maximum is variable within this domain, and unlike the F0 peak in the aforementioned studies (in phrase-final rise-falls in polar questions and contrastive statements) the location of the F0 peak on question words exhibits gradient variability: Peaks may align on any segment of the relevant word’s syllables. The tonal contour characterising question words was interpreted as a sequence of a low initial boundary tone and a falling tonal event associating to the Qword but aligning freely within its domain.
In sum, work on Tashlhiyt intonation so far has shown that tonal placement in this language exhibits multiple kinds of variability. At the same time, all findings are compatible with the assumption that lexical stress is absent and by consequence, that there are no pre-specified syllables that may serve as a lexical anchor for intonational tones.
Future studies will have to complement our current knowledge in order to evaluate proposed analyses and to increase our understanding of prosodic structure and intonation in Tashlhiyt. Fruitful avenues for future research are the investigation of tonal events and phrasing in longer utterances. Impressionistic observations from semi-spontaneous tasks hint at the possibility of richer prosodic structure in longer phrases than the patterns described by our working group so far. The question arises as to whether there is robust evidence for different types of prosodic constituents that are larger than the phonological word. Only after gaining a broader understanding of prosodic structure and after considering the full range of phonological tonal events, a complete analysis of intonation in Tashlhiyt can be proposed. We hope that the present corpus can contribute towards reaching this goal.
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