Speaker: Kristine Yu (UMass)
Title: Tonal marking of absolutive case in Samoan
Date: Friday, January 6th
Time: 3:30-5:00p
Place: 32-141
This paper argues that the ergative-marking Austronesian language
Samoan has a high boundary tone that occurs on the last mora of the
word preceding an absolutive argument, and that the source of this
tone is inflectional morphology and not lexical representations,
pragmatics, syntax, semantics, or phonology. In short, the claim is
that Samoan has an absolutive high boundary tone case morpheme. This
claim is surprising for two reasons. First, Samoan is not a tone
language. Second, regardless of the source of the absolutive tone,
positing it: (1) introduces a boundary paradox since it groups an
absolutive case head with the prosodic constituent preceding the
absolutive argument, and (2) implies that the presence of an
absolutive induces a new phonological constituent. Nevertheless, I
show that inflectional morphology must be the source of the absolutive
high tone based on a converging body of evidence from: (1) the
distribution of the rarely discussed ia particle that optionally
precedes absolutive arguments and (2) the phonetic and phonological
analysis of intonational patterns in the spoken utterances of a
systematically varied set of syntactic structures. I also address the
puzzles that the presence of an absolutive tonal case morpheme in
Samoan raises.