State of Knowledge

Many grammatical aspects of Tashlhiyt are well documented (e.g. Stumme 1899, Aspinion 1953, Applegate 1958, Galand 1988, Dell & Elmedlaoui 1989, 2002). A great deal of work has been carried out on phonotactic patterns, morphophonemic alternations, and prosodic morphology (e.g. Dell & Elmedlaoui 2002, for an overview). More recently, a number of instrumental studies have looked at phonetic details of certain phonological phenomena (cf. Ridouane 2014, for an overview).

Beyond impressionistic observations, higher prosodic aspects like stress and intonation were neglected in earlier work on Tashlhiyt. Yet Tashlhiyt is of particular relevance for intonation theory for two reasons: First, impressionistic observations of different scholars throughout the last century have indicated that Tashlhiyt lacks word stress. The absence of lexically determined metrical structure raises the question as to how intonational tones are associated with the segmental string. Second, Tashlhiyt is renowned for its cross-linguistically rare phonotactic flexibility, allowing, in theory, for whole utterances to consist of voiceless obstruents. This raises interesting questions relating to the realisation of pitch movement in minimally sonorous contexts.

Since 2011, our research group in Cologne has started to explore aspects of prosodic structure and intonation in Tashlhiyt (Grice et al. 2011, 2015, Roettger & Grice 2015, Roettger et al. 2015, Bruggeman et al., 2017, Roettger, accepted). Our work explored questions such as whether there is any evidence for word stress in Tashlhiyt and how certain pragmatic functions are expressed prosodically.

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