Speaker: Charles W. Kisseberth (Emeritus, University of Illinois and Tel Aviv University)
Title: Prosody and Phonological Phrasing in Chimwiini
Time: Wed 4/13, 5-7pm, Location TBA
In this paper we explore the fundamentals of the prosody
and phrasing of sentences in Chimwiini, a Bantu language closely
related to Swahili. We look first at the pattern of vowel length
alternations at the word level, a system that Selkirk (1986) analyzed
in terms of an abstract system of stress that features the Latin
Stress Rule plus a principle that shortens unstressed vowels. Then we
look at the system of accent which, in the default case assigns penult
accent (H tone), but final accent in certain mostly morphosyntactic
environements.It turns out that both the stress system and the accent
are phrasal in nature and work in exactly the same phrasal units.
After demonstrating this point, we summarize the main principles that
define the phrasing of a Chimwiini sentence: Align-XP R (align the
right edge of a lexical maximal projection with the right edge of a
phonological phrase) and Align-Foc R (align the right edge of a
focused element with the right edge of a phonological phrase). We
discusss briefly some phenomena that may be subcases of Align-Foc R or
related to it in terms of the pattern of behavior.The final portion of the paper explores how final accent
is realized in Chimwiini sentences and suggests that the essential
principle is this: final accent is located on the final syllable of
any phonological phrase that contains the trigger of final accent. To
make this principle succeed, it turns out that we need a third
phrasing principle: Wrap-XP (all the elements in an XP must appear
inside a single phonological phrase) plus recursive phrasing.