| ROA: | 203 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Toward a Unified Decompositional Analysis of Khoisan lexical tone |
| Authors: | Amanda Miller-Ockhuizen |
| Comment: | |
| 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 |