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ROA:203
Title:Toward a Unified Decompositional Analysis of Khoisan lexical tone
Authors:Amanda Miller-Ockhuizen
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Length:32
Abstract:Towards a Unified Decompositional Analysis OF Khoisan Lexical Tone



Amanda L. Miller-Ockhuizen

The Ohio State University

amiller@ling.ohio-state.edu





Khoisan tonology, specifically !Xoo tonology, has been argued to

have contour unit tones (Traill, 1985), but Haacke (1992) argues for

a decompositional approach to Khoekhoe. This paper gives evidence for a

decompositional approach for both Ju/'hoasi and !Xoo. The mora is the

tone bearing unit since the number of tones in a word is equal to the

number of moras. The domain of tonal specification is the morpheme.

There are restrictions that occur in this domain, but not in polymor-

phemic domains. Derived tonal sequences follow a stepwise pattern. A

scalar phonetically-based feature for tone is proposed to elucidate the

data, and an Optimality Theoretic analysis is given which allows the

differences between the two languages to be explained as a difference

in constraint ranking.


Type:Paper/tech report
Area/Keywords:
Article:Version 1