Abstract
This paper establishes the lexical tone contrasts in the Nigerian language Izon, focusing on evidence for floating tone. Many tonal languages show effects of floating tone, though typically in a restricted way, such as occurring with only a minority of morphemes, or restricted to certain grammatical environments. For Izon, the claim here is that all lexical items sponsor floating tone, making it ubiquitous across the lexicon and as common as pre-associated tone. The motivation for floating tone comes from the tonal patterns of morphemes in isolation and within tone groups. Based on these patterns, all lexical morphemes are placed into one of four tone classes defined according to which floating tones they end in. This paper provides extensive empirical support for this analysis and discusses several issues which emerge under ubiquitous floating tone. Issues include the principled allowance of OCP(T) violations, and the propensity for word-initial vowels and low tone to coincide.
Highlights
One of the most influential developments in 20th century phonology was formally separating the segmental tier from the suprasegmental tier, codified in the work of Autosegmental Phonology (Goldsmith 1976)
No all floating: No sequences consist only of floating tones e.g. L, H, HL, etc. After these systematic gaps are taken into account, there are only four remaining patterns – LL, LH, HL, and HH – all of which correspond to B and C tone classes in Izon
While the tone spreading alternative eliminates floating tone in classes B and C, it still requires it for classes A and D
Summary
One of the most influential developments in 20th century phonology was formally separating the segmental tier from the suprasegmental tier, codified in the work of Autosegmental Phonology (Goldsmith 1976). Classes are defined based their systematic effect on the following words, e.g. replacement by a LH pattern (class A), replacement by all H (class B), by all L (class C), or by a HL pattern (class D) Each of these replacement patterns is analyzed as a sequence of floating tones which appear after any pre-associated tones. Towards the end of this paper, I directly compare the floating tone analysis to an alternative involving ‘obligatory tone spreading’, whereby the final tone of a word is required to spread across its word boundary Common to both approaches is that the tonal effects can be interpreted as the phonologization of pitch carry-over within its tonal domain (McPherson 2016). Appendix D in particular provides information on the conventions used in data citation, as well as background on data collection, subsequent databases, archiving information of recordings, and select .wav files for data points used in this paper (found in the supplemental materials)
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