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Intonation Adapts to Lexical Tone: The Case of Kammu

  • Anastasia Karlsson , David House and Jan-Olof Svantesson
Published/Copyright: November 16, 2012
Phonetica
From the journal Phonetica Volume 69 Issue 1-2

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate how lexical tones interact with intonation, using data from the Austroasiatic language Kammu, one of few languages with two dialects whose only major phonological difference is the presence or absence of lexical tones. Northern (and Western) Kammu have developed tones in connection with the merger of voiceless and voiced initial consonants, while the non-tonal Eastern dialect kept the segmental opposition with no tones. We found the following prosodic hierarchy: (1) lexical tones, (2) phrase-final boundary tone, (3) focus marking. The results strongly suggest that the intonational systems of the two Kammu dialects are basically identical, and that the main differences between the dialects are adaptations of intonation patterns to the lexical tones when the identities of the tones are jeopardized.

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*Anastasia Karlsson, Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, PO Box 201, SE–221 00 Lund (Sweden), E-Mail Anastasia.Karlsson@ling.lu.se
Received: 2012-06-04
Accepted: 2012-08-30
Published Online: 2012-11-16
Published in Print: 2012-11-01

© 2012 S. Karger AG, Basel

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Paper
  2. Title Page / Table of Contents
  3. Front and Back Matter
  4. Front & Back Matter
  5. Editorial
  6. Bridging the Segment-Prosody Divide in Speech Production and Perception
  7. Original Paper
  8. At the Edge of Intonation: The Interplay of Utterance-Final F0 Movements and Voiceless Fricative Sounds
  9. Intonation Adapts to Lexical Tone: The Case of Kammu
  10. Making Sense of Outliers
  11. The Perception of Lexical Stress in German: Effects of Segmental Duration and Vowel Quality in Different Prosodic Patterns
  12. Intelligibility of Non-Natively Produced Dutch Words: Interaction between Segmental and Suprasegmental Errors
  13. Further Section
  14. Index autorum
https://doi.org/10.1159/000343169

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Paper
  2. Title Page / Table of Contents
  3. Front and Back Matter
  4. Front & Back Matter
  5. Editorial
  6. Bridging the Segment-Prosody Divide in Speech Production and Perception
  7. Original Paper
  8. At the Edge of Intonation: The Interplay of Utterance-Final F0 Movements and Voiceless Fricative Sounds
  9. Intonation Adapts to Lexical Tone: The Case of Kammu
  10. Making Sense of Outliers
  11. The Perception of Lexical Stress in German: Effects of Segmental Duration and Vowel Quality in Different Prosodic Patterns
  12. Intelligibility of Non-Natively Produced Dutch Words: Interaction between Segmental and Suprasegmental Errors
  13. Further Section
  14. Index autorum
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