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Contrastive tonal alignment in falling contours in Shilluk*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2015

Bert Remijsen  and
Otto Gwado Ayoker
Bert Remijsen*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Otto Gwado Ayoker*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
*
E-mail: b.remijsen@ed.ac.uk
E-mail: ottoayoker@gmail.com.
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Abstract

It has been assumed that tonal alignment is not contrastive in contour tones (e.g. Hyman 1988, Odden 1995, Yip 2002). However, Remijsen (2013) and DiCanio et al. (2014) have recently reported evidence for this configuration. In relation to this controversy, we report on an acoustic analysis of the tone system of Shilluk. The dataset is built around the contrast of Low vs. Early-aligned High Fall vs. Late-aligned High Fall vs. High in closed monosyllabic stems with a short vowel. The results support the hypothesis that tonal alignment is contrastive in falling contour tones in Shilluk: the two falling contours differ consistently and significantly in terms of tonal alignment, relative both to one another and to phonetically similar level-tone configurations. The falling contours do not differ significantly in terms of a number of other phonetic parameters (F0 height, size of F0 change, duration).

Type
Articles
Information
Phonology , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , December 2014 , pp. 435 - 462
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

We thank the speakers who participated in the recording sessions. They are (in addition to the second author): James Peter Othol, Paulino Okan Chol, Anesa Nyacam, Musa Kuku Jago, Emmanuel Antony Deng, Emmanuel John Adung, Alexander Otwongo Ajak, Francis Boywomo Opiti, Tupac Laa Wol, William Amum Onwar, Amum Obwony and Elia Otham Wan. We also gratefully acknowledge the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the British Council, both in South Sudan, for enabling the first author to carry out fieldwork research there. We thank Carlos Gussenhoven and Vincent van Heuven, as well as the editors, associate editor and three anonymous reviewers at Phonology, for valuable feedback on earlier versions, and Udita Sawhney for help with proofreading. Both fieldwork data collection and the involvement of the second author were made possible through financial support from the Volkswagen Foundation, which funded this research as part of the project ‘Tonal placement: the interaction of qualitative and quantitative factors (ToPIQQ)’, coordinated at the University of Cologne by Martine Grice and Anne Hermes. We gratefully acknowledge their support.

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