Final Mora Research Articles

Sandhi-based predictability of pitch accent facilitates word recognition in Kansai Japanese speakers.

This study investigates the predictability effects of pitch accent on word recognition using the sandhi rule in Kansai Japanese (KJ). Native KJ speakers and native Tokyo Japanese (TJ) speakers (control group) saw images of four objects while hearing modifier + noun phrases and selected the corresponding image as quickly as possible. The word-initial tone of the noun's initial mora was predictable or unpredictable based on the tone of the preceding modifier's final mora in KJ but not in TJ. Experiment 1 found faster reaction times in the predictable conditions compared with the unpredictable conditions in KJ speakers but only when the modifier had an all-low tone sequence. This finding suggests that a modifier-ending that changes following the sandhi rule can function as a reliable cue to constrain an upcoming tone, whereas a modifier-ending tone that remains the same as in the citation form cannot (although the next tone is predictable). Unexpectedly, we found the same effect, albeit weaker, in TJ speakers. Experiment 2 replicated this effect and additionally showed that the facilitation effect was not due to TJ speakers having sufficient exposure to KJ to be familiar with the KJ sandhi rule. We speculate that the effect in TJ speakers is related to a language universal constraint against a sequence of low tones without a high tone within a phonological word, which may urge listeners to listen for a high tone in the upcoming input.

Outward-sensitive phonologically-conditioned suppletive allomorphy vs. first-last tone harmony in Cilungu

We present a case study of grammatical tone allomorphy in Cilungu (Bantu). Tense/Aspect/Mood designations (TAMs) are realized via co-exponence of prefixes, suffixes, and floating tones. In a minority of TAMs, there is allomorphy with the floating tones. For example, in the Recent Past one allomorph involves floating tone targeting the final mora of the stem () versus one targeting the stem’s second mora (2). For all such allomorphic TAMs, the alternation is conditioned by the tone of subject agreement markers (SMs) at the left edge of the word. If the SM is high-toned the variant occurs, but if it is toneless then 2 occurs. We present two competing accounts of these data. Under a morphological account, we posit contextual realizational rules with multiple suppletive exponents conditioned by SM tone. In contrast, under a phonological account a ‘first-last tone harmony’ applies here, morphologically restricted to the context of SMs with a small set of TAMs. Such a harmony rule captures a generalization of these alternations: if the SM is high at the left edge then there is a grammatical high at the right edge, but if the left edge is toneless then grammatical tone does not fall on the right edge. We present several arguments in favor of the morphological analysis (suppletion) over a phonological one (harmony). Specifically, the patterns are not subject to phonological locality, other TAMs involving similar tone patterns are not subject to this harmony, and the proposed first-last tone harmony would be a highly phonologically-unnatural rule with little cross-linguistic support, and exceeding the computational properties of all well-known and established phonological operations. We conclude by discussing a major theoretical implication of the morphological account: this constitutes outward-sensitive phonologically-conditioned suppletive allomorphy, standardly argued to be unattested and/or impossible. Ultimately, we hold that under either account Cilungu presents a novel and important contribution to linguistic theory.

The Žemaitian Accent Retraction as a Typological Parallel to Olander’s Mobility Law

ABSTRACT In his 2009 monograph, Thomas Olander presented a new solution to the old problem of the origin of Balto-Slavic mobile accent paradigms. According to his “mobility law,” pre-Proto-Balto-Slavic words accented on the final mora became phonologically unaccented and automatically received ictus on the first syllable of the phonological word, as in *longós > *ˌlāˀngas > Lith. lángas, CS *lǫ̑gъ. The theory is supported by two typological parallels from contemporary Slavic dialects (Podravina and Zaonežje). However, a parallel can also be found in the Baltic material: the Žemaitian accent retraction, a phenomenon well described by Lithuanian dialectologists, shares some features with Olander’s mobility law and the above-mentioned parallels in Slavic, such as a peculiar phonetic realization of the retracted accent, retraction to the first syllable of the phonological word, partial neutralization of tonal oppositions under the retracted accent, and possible origin due to language contact. Moreover, a closer examination of the irregularities in the Žemaitian process could shed some more light on the origins of at least some of the exceptions to the mobility law, as well as of the somewhat different outcomes of this law in Baltic and Slavic.

Moraic Footing in Suzhou Chinese: Evidence from Toneless Moras

The current study provides additional phonetic data for the light-initial sandhi patterns in Suzhou Chinese, illustrating a context-sensitive pitch alternation that is not present after heavy-initial forms, and has not been attested in other neighboring Northern Wu varieties either. I propose that such pitch alternation is due to interpolation effects on toneless prosodic constituents, here toneless moras. A binary trochee built directly on moras yields an unparsed (i.e. toneless) final mora in light-heavy disyllables, accounting for the pitch patterns on the surface. Such an analysis is not only empirically adequate, but also echoes the cross-linguistic structural observation that a foot head lighter in weight than the dependent is generally dispreferred (Head-Dependent Asymmetry; cf. Dresher and van der Hulst 1998).

Loan Words Stress System in Bedouin Jordanian Arabic: An Optimality Theoretic Account

This study investigates the stress system of loan words in Bedouin Jordanian Arabic from an optimality theoretic perspective. The data is obtained from Huneety and Mashaqba's (2016) recent study. The corpus of the study consists of thirty-four words: nine monosyllabic words, nine disyllabic words, and sixteen words that are of at least three syllables. The data analysis is conduct in two interrelated stages: the data in light of metrical parameters following Hayes (1995). The aim of this stage is to evaluate the conclusion that Huneety and Mashaqba (2016) have reached through their analysis. The second stage of data analysis will analyze loan words under the Optimality Theoretic approach following (Prince & Smolensky, 1993). The findings of the study confirm Huneety's and Mashaqba's (2016) conclusion in that stress in BJA follows the following parameters: trochaic footing from left to right and that the language is quantity sensitive. The final mora is extrametrical and degenerate feet are not allowed. Moreover, the study shows that the dialect abides a universal set of OT constraints. The study shows that BJA stress system abides the following constraint ranking: LXWD=PRWD, RHTYPE TROCHEE, MAIN RIGHT, *SECONDARY, FTBINμ>> NonFinal μ >> PARSE SYL >> NONFINALITY >> ALLFTRIGHT >> ALLFTLEFT.

How native speakers of Japanese try to sound polite

AbstractThis study examines phonetic cues used to express politeness in spoken Japanese. The tasks of producing polite and non-polite speech in two different types of sentences (a question and a polite imperative) and in attitudinal speech (a request and a decline) were used to examine various F0 and temporal aspects of polite speech. Eight sentences spoken by 18 native speakers were acoustically measured at both sentence level and sentence final mora level. It was found that Japanese native speakers generally use a slower speech rate and a breathy voice for polite speech, but not necessarily a high pitched voice or wider pitch range, even in the case of female speakers. The use of pitch was found to be attitude dependent, but was not affected by the sentence type. Clear gender differences were seen in various phonetic aspects. Some politeness strategies observed at individual level are also reported.

Phrasal phonology in Copperbelt Bemba

Copperbelt Bemba exhibits several rightward spreading tonal processes which are sensitive to prosodic phrase structure. The rightmost H tone in a word will undergo unbounded spreading if the word is final in a phonological phrase (φ). In an intonational phrase consisting of several single-word φ's, the rightmost H in the first word will spread through all following toneless φ's. From a rule-based perspective, this can only be accounted for by positing mutually feeding iterative rules, as a single H-tone spreading rule cannot account for the long-distance spreading. Rather, a second rule that spreads a H from the final mora of one word onto the initial mora of the following word is required, as a bridge to further unbounded spreading. Three phrase-sensitive OT constraints are proposed to account for H-tone spreading between words. One is of the domain-juncture variety, requiring the specification of two separate prosodic domains.

Accent in Uspanteko

Uspanteko (Guatemala; ∼2000 speakers) is an endangered K’ichean-branch Mayan language. It is unique among the K’ichean languages in having innovated a system of contrastive pitch accent, which operates alongside a separate system of non-contrastive stress. The prosody of Uspanteko is of general typological interest, given the relative scarcity of ‘mixed’ languages employing both stress and lexical pitch. Drawing from a descriptive grammar and from our own fieldwork, we also document some intricate interactions between pitch accent and other aspects of the phonology (stress placement, vowel length, vowel quality, and two deletion processes). While pitch accent is closely tied to morphology, the location of lexical tone is entirely a matter of surface phonology. We propose that the position of pitch accent and stress is determined by three factors: (i) feet are always right-aligned, and preferably iambic; (ii) pitch accent must fall on a stressed syllable; and (iii) pitch accent cannot fall on a final mora. These assumptions derive default final stress, as well as a regular pattern of tone-triggered stress shift. Interactions between prosody and segmental phonotactics are attributed to further constraints on footing. Surprisingly, we find robust evidence for foot structure in Uspanteko, even though these patterns could easily be described in non-metrical terms. Interactions between tone and vowel length also provide evidence for lexical strata within the Uspanteko vocabulary.

Feet, Syllables, Moras and the Estonian Quantity System

The Estonian language is unique in that it differentiates between three degrees of length in vowels, as well as in consonants. Phonologically, the ternary system of Estonian quantity has been interpreted in a variety of manners, but a generally accepted description has yet to be found. In the present paper, I argue for the approach that overlong segments arise due to foot-final lengthening in monosyllabic feet. Foot-final lengthening is not simply a matter of phonetic implementation. The lengthening may be the result of the addition of a mora at the end of the foot or from the strength of the final mora. I focus my discussion on the second case, which links foot- final lengthening and quantity degrees to the well-known Iambic-Trochaic Law.

On the weight of phrase-final prosodic words in a sign language

This article seeks to explore a prosodic explanation for the frequent occurrence of pointing signs phrase-finally. Corpus data from Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) show that indeed pointing signs occur highly frequently at the end of sentences, and an elicitation study shows that pointing signs, other light lexical elements, and phonetic phenomena like final holds occur in alternation in NGT. The addition of a final mora to the end of a phrase is argued not to be sufficient to account for these alternations. A complementary analysis in terms of prosodic and metrical phonology is sketched, whereby the final foot or prosodic word is required to be minimally trimoraic.

Weight sensitivity and syllable codas in Srinagar Koshur

This paper describes and analyses the pattern of word stress found in the standard dialect of Koshur (Kashmiri) spoken in Srinagar. The significance of Koshur for studies of stress lies in that taken together, its pattern of stress assignment and a pervasive pattern of syncope conspire to produce a four-way syllable weight distinction that has sometimes been expressed as the scale CVːC>CVː>CVC>CV. The interesting feature of this type of scale is that closed syllables, CVːC and CVC are preferred as stress peaks over open syllables with vowels of the same length. Other researchers have noted that in languages with this scale, or the abbreviated ternary version CVː>CVC>CV, CVC syllables behave ambiguously with respect to stress. They seem to be heavy in relation to CV when CVː syllables are absent. In a stress clash context however, CVC defers to CVː. ‘Mora-only’ accounts of other languages with this scale have interpreted the ambiguous behaviour of CVC as evidence that CVC syllables are bimoraic where their behaviour seems to group them with CVː but monomoraic elsewhere (e.g. Rosenthall & van der Hulst 1999, Morén 2000). To account for the CVːC>CVː effect, mora-only accounts have been forced to assume that CVːC are trimoraic. We show that a mora-only analysis does not offer a satisfying account of the Koshur facts, and we argue instead that the origin of the CVC>CV and CVːC>CVː effects is the presence of a coda that branches from the final mora of a syllable, making the closed syllables more harmonic as prosodic heads. Under this view, branchingness emerges as another dimension of the mora, along with moraic quantity and the quality of segments linked to moras, which contributes to syllable prominence.

Production and Perception of Pitch Accent in Japanese

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Perception of Japanese pitch accent: Examination of minimal accent pairs

Perception of Japanese pitch accent was examined using 20 bimoraic/disyllabic minimal accent pairs. A minimal accent pair refers to a pair of words that is identical except for their accent types. For example, /hana/ ‘‘flower’’ and /hana/ ‘‘nose’’ have the same phonemic sequence and the pitch pattern of low‐high yet they differ in that ‘‘flower’’ has accent on the word‐final mora while ‘‘nose’’ has no accent (unaccented). A preceding production study that utilized the same 20 pairs of words found that the maximum F0 in the word‐final mora was reliably higher for the final‐accented words than the unaccented words and the F0 rise from the initial mora to the final mora was reliably larger for the final accented words than the unaccented ones when they were produced sentence‐medially followed by a particle. However, the two accent types did not show any reliable difference when they were produced by themselves in isolation. This perception study accesses if the properties found to be related to Japanese pitch accent in production are actually used by listeners when they identify accent types. The relation between the production and perception of Japanese pitch accent will be discussed.

音声対話での話者交替／継続の予測における韻律情報の有効性

In this study, we investigated the relationship between turn-taking and prosody. We considered that to interact smoothly in real-time communication, speakers must show presignals to turn-taking as prosodic features before turn edges. We attempted to discriminate the turn change by the decision tree method using only prosodic features in turn-final accentual phrases that include earlier positions compared with turn-final mora. In the discrimination experiment, we used the corpus of Japanese spontaneous dialogue, and defined prosodic parameters such as F0 contour, power contour and duration. We compared the two parameter conditions for using parameters with and without the final mora of turns. From the results, the accuracy under the conditions of not using the parameters of the final mora is 80%, which is not significantly worse than the result of 83% when using all parameters. Taking into account only prosody was used, we consider this result to be fairly good.

Phonemic effects in spoken-word recognition in Japanese

Previous studies have shown that Japanese listeners are sensitive to the moraic structure of speech, and find it easier to manipulate or respond to morae than phonemes. We further examined moraic processing via two word reconstruction experiments, in which Japanese listeners heard three- or four-mora nonwords which could be changed into real words by substitution of a single mora. In experiment 1, listeners had to change the first mora of the nonword, in experiment 2 the final mora. We compared three types of substitution for CV morae: substitution preserving the C (e.g., kimera or kamere for, respectively, the first and last mora of the word kamera, which has three morae: ka-me-ra), substitution preserving V (namera, kamena), or substitution preserving neither (nimera, kamene). When C or V was preserved, responses were significantly faster and more accurate than when neither was preserved. In initial position, there was no difference between C- and V-preserving substitutions, but in final position, preservation of the C led to faster and more accurate responses than preservation of the V. These results confirm that spoken word recognition in Japanese is sensitive to vocabulary structure and similarity (inter alia at a submoraic level) between words.

Lexical extraprosodicity in Chilungu

Nouns in Chilungu, a Bantu language spoken in Zambia, exhibit more tonal distinctions synchronically than exist in many modern Bantu languages. There exists a five-way distinction in nouns with CVCV sterns and a four-way distinction in nouns with monosyllabic stems. We show that any synchronic analysis which assumes a two-way tonal distinction for each Tone Bearing Unit (e.g., H vs. L, or H vs. ¢) cannot predict the attested number of surface tonal patterns. We avoid this dilemma by proposing that the final mora of certain noun roots is extraprosodic. This assumption not only correctly predicts the attested surface patterns, but results in rules which are well-motivated both theoretically and typologically (in Bantu). We argue that lexical conditioning of extraprosodicity is a natural outgrowth of prosodic theory, parallel to the use of lexical stress and lexical accent.