Speaker: Sun-Ah Jun (UCLA)
Title: A typology of word prominence marking and intonational tone types and functions
Time: Friday, April 11th, 3.30-5pm
Location: 32-141
Abstract: In the framework of Autosegmental-metrical (AM) model of intonational phonology (Pierrehumbert 1980, Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986, Ladd 1996/2008), tones have two functions: prominence marking and boundary marking. Prominence of a word is marked by a pitch accent realized on a stressed syllable of the word, and prosodic boundaries are marked by a boundary tone realized on the edge of a prosodic unit. This model works well for languages similar to English. However, word prominence is marked differently in languages that do not have stress or in languages where stress is predictable and the acoustic correlates of stress are weak. Based on word prosody and the intonation system of various languages, three types of word prominence marking have been proposed in Jun (2005, 2014): (1) head-prominence languages like English, (2) edge-prominence languages like Korean, and (3) head/edge-prominence languages like Bengali and French. In this talk, I will show, based on data from languages such as Paraguayan Guarani, Farasani Arabic, and Tatar, how languages differ further in marking word prominence and how the original AM model needs to be extended to include more types and functions of intonational tones.