In Defense of Prosodic Typology: A Response to Beckman & Venditti

Abstract

In two recent handbook articles, Beckman & Venditti (2010, 2011) present overviews of tone and intonation which take issue both with traditional typology and with recent attempts to bring clarity to the rather confused study of prosodic typology. In the course of their coverage BV (ii) if yes, what does the prosodic system do with the tones and/or stress, both at the word level and postlexically? Given the level-ordered nature of phonological systems, only after the first two questions are dealt with can we move on to the the question with which B&V are most concerned: (iii) how are the surface or output wordprosodic properties integrated with phrase- and utterance-level intonation? While B&V question the usefulness of “broad-stroke typologies” which have traditionally distinguished tone, stress and intonation, their disposition to minimize systemic differences in favor of surface comparisons of phonetic realizations raises important questions concerning levels of representation and the nature of phonological typology itself.