Disambiguating Yoruba´ tones: At the interface between syntax, morphology, phonology and phonetics
Loading...
Date
2011-08-10
Authors
Ajíbóyè, O
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Lingua: International Review of General Linguistics
Abstract
This paper considers a particular type of tonal behavior in Yoru` ba´ with the goal of testing
whether syntactic and phonological domains converge or diverge.We consider two types
of syntactically conditioned phonological rules: (i) the appearance of phonological
elements not present lexically (epenthesis/insertion), (ii) the loss of phonological
elements (deletion). These types of rules are often tightly interconnected as the (apparent)
loss of one element may involve the appearance of some other element. The cases we
consider here involve two Yoru` ba´ tone rules whose surface effect is to change a lexically
specified tone (or tone sequence). One of the rules is syntactically conditioned in that it
applies across a phrasal boundary; the other rule is morphologically conditioned in that it
applies within the word/X0 domain. The two tone rules are conditioned by two distinct
domains, namely syntax (the phrasal domain) versus morphology (the word-level
domain). We will demonstrate that a consideration of two independent well-formedness
conditions—syntactic inclusiveness and phonological structure preservation—leads us to
entertain the possibility that the outputs of tone rules will be distinct from one another
according to whether they apply across a phrasal domain (i.e. are syntactically
conditioned) or whether they apply within a word (i.e. are morphologically conditioned).