Pitch Accent in the Apachean Languages

Abstract

The Apachean languages compose the southernmost sub-stock of the great Athapaskan family of American Indian languages. In the Apachean sub-stock are found six mutually unintelligible idioms: Navaho, San Carlos, ChiricahuaMescalero, Jicarilla, Lipan, and Kiowa-Apache. The following remarks on pitch accent apply with equal force to each of these languages, such minor differences as occur in their accentual systems not being taken into consideration. Pitch accent, according to Bloomfield,' functions as a primary phoneme in very many languages and probably is employed as a secondary phoneme in many more. It is convenient to distinguish three ways in which pitch accent may function in a given language: (1) as a phrasal or sentence phoneme, where the toneme (i.e. feature of pitch accent) pertains to syntactic constructions alone; (2) as a word phoneme, where the toneme is a part of the phonetic form of the word; and (3) as a syllable toneme, where the phonetic group comprising the syllable must include at least one distinctive feature of pitch accent. English is commonly given as an example of the first usage: thus, the difference between the statement He is here and the question He is here? is a matter of pitch accent. The Sinitic languages supply examples of the use of pitch as a word phoneme; many words in these languages differ from one another only in their tonal patterns. Pitch accent in the Apachean languages, though superficially similar to that of Chinese in that each word has a definite pitch melody, actually belongs to the third type distinguished above, the pitch accent of the Apachean word being the sum of the tonemes of its constituent syllables. Parenthetically, it may be noted that Apachean is not the only sub-stock of Athapaskan in which syllable tonemes are found. Indeed, the first report that any Athapaskan language possessed pitch accent is to be found in Sapir's note on pitch accent in Sarcee, a language of the northern Athapaskan group.2 Subsequently it has been clearly demonstrated that pitch accent is found in Chipewyan, Hare, and Kutchin-all within the northern group-and that it probably exists in Carrier and others of this group as well. The only Athapaskan languages in which pitch accent is definitely known to be absent are Hupa, Mattole, Wailaki, and perhaps one or two others of the Pacific Coast group. An utterance in the Apachean languages, phonetically considered, is a succession of evenly stressed syllables each of which possesses a clearly defined pitch accent or tone. Though speakers of these languages, like those of any other, vary the accentual patterns of their utterances in response to emotional and other non-linguistic factors, these variations are individual and haphazard. In other words, there are no distinctive accentual patterns characteristic of the word, the phrase, or the sentence which stand over and above the accentual