Situating Blackfoot within a typology of (mobile) boundary tone grammars

Abstract

We propose that boundary tones are best understood as derived from the interaction of constraints that introduce tones at certain levels of the prosodic hierarchy and constraints that govern the alignment of those tones to segmental material. On this decomposition of the classic notion of a boundary tone, we expect to find languages in which a tone introduced by a prosodic constituent surfaces away from the edge of that constituent. We refer to these as 'mobile' boundary tones. Informed by a quantitative analysis of pitch contours, we argue that Blackfoot is a mobile boundary tone language. We provide a grammar to account for the Blackfoot pattern, where a L tone introduced by the prosodic word surfaces before a H tone docked to the stress syllable, and we situate Blackfoot within a mini-typology predicted by re-ranking of the proposed constraints.