We intended to establish if two lexical tone contrasts in Zhumadian Mandarin, one between early and late aligned falls and another between early and late aligned rises, are perceived categorically, while the difference between declarative and interrogative pronunciations of these four tones is perceived gradiently. Presenting stimuli from 7-point acoustic continua between tones and between intonations, we used an identification task and a discrimination task with an experimental group of native listeners and a control group of Indonesian listeners, whose language employs none of the differences within either the falling or the rising pitch contours in its phonology. Only the lexical condition as perceived by the experimental group yielded sigmoid identification functions and a heightened discriminatory sensitivity around the midpoint of continua. The intonational condition in the native group and both conditions in the control group yielded gradient identification functions and smaller, reverse effects of the continuum midpoints in the discrimination task. The results are interpreted to mean that sentence modality contrasts can be expressed gradiently, but that lexical tone differences are represented phonologically, and hence are perceived categorically, despite low phonetic salience of the contrast. This conclusion challenges assumptions about the relation between linguistic functions and linguistic structures.

Köhnlein (2016) proposes to represent the Franconian tone contrast as a difference in foot structure, whereby Accent 1 appears in lexically marked syllabic trochees and Accent 2 in default moraic trochees, as an alternative to analyses with an underlying privative tone for Accent 2. After sketching the two approaches, we argue against three arguments Köhnlein advances in favour of the metrical analysis. We then show that one of the disadvantages incurred by the metrically derived tonal representations is the introduction of a novel and otherwise unsupported concept of a single tone that incorporates two morphologically different but phonologically identical tones. We also evaluate Köhnlein's (2018) more recent proposal to use the syllabic trochee to account for subtractive plurals in tonal dialects. Finally, we compare the predictive powers of the metrical and tonal analyses of the Arzbach dialect.

A multi-speaker acoustic study on citation tones in Kaifeng Mandarin, referred to as LH, HL, H and L, shows that L is realized as three different subtypes by different speakers, i.e. dipping, falling and falling with lengthening, while generally being longer than the other three tones and frequently spoken with creaky voice in part of the vowel. This inter-speaker variation is reflected in the different transcriptions of Kaifeng L that have been given in the literature. We argue that a L-tone is intrinsically less salient than a H-tone, due to a lack of phonetic space in the low pitch range as well as to a potential ambiguity between contextual low pitch around f0 peaks and low pitch due to L-tones, and thus more likely to be enhanced.

Zwara Berber is a variety of Nafusi (ISO 639-3; Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2016) which belongs to the eastern Zenati group within northern Berber (where Berber is the scientific term for Tamazight), a branch of Afro-Asiatic. Zwara (Zuwārah, Zuwara, Zuāra, Zuara, Zouara) is a coastal city located at 32.9° N, 12.1° E in Libya. The speakers refer to themselves as /at ˈwil.lul/ (also /ajt ˈwil.lul/) ‘those of Willul’ and to their specific variety of the language as /t.ˈwil.lult/ ‘the language of Willul’. Having no official status during the Italian colonization of Libya and the first period after the country's independence in 1951, repression of the language became severe after the Cultural Revolution of 1973. Its propagation through teaching and the media fell under a constitutional ban on the denial of the Arab identity of the state, and qualified as such as treason, a capital offense. Until the revolution of 2011 (‘17 February’), the language was therefore not spoken in cultural, educational or governmental domains and could not be taught, printed or broadcast. The number of Tamazight speakers in Libya is estimated at 184,000 in Lewis et al. (2016) and at 560,000 by Chakel & Ferkal (2012). In the absence of a municipal register, the number of inhabitants in Zwara is uncertain. A conservative estimate is between 50,000 and 100,000, which is also the number of speakers of the Zwara variety. Other than through exposure by radio and television, children learn Arabic only from age six, when attending school. Speakers have variable L2 Arabic competence depending on exposure to the language.

Varieties of Malay, including Indonesian, have been variously described as having word stress on the penultimate syllable, as having variable word stress and as having a phrase-final pitch accent without word stress. In Ambonese Malay, the alignment of sentence-final pitch peaks fails to support the existence of either word stress or phrase-final pitch accents. Also, the shape of its pitch peaks fails to vary systematically with the information status of the phrase-final word. The two intonation melodies of the language include phrase-final boundary-tone complexes which do not associate with any syllables. The declarative rise-fall would appear to be timed so as to occur within the last word of the sentence. Minimal stress pairs presented in earlier descriptions show a contrast between /a/ and a segmentally distinct weak /ă/, a contrast that also appears in positions that have not been claimed to have stress. A preliminary phonological analysis concludes the account.

Shanghai Chinese (Shanghainese; 上海话) is a Wu dialect (ISO 639-3; code: wuu) spoken in the city of Shanghai (CN-31), one of the four municipalities in the People's Republic of China. Over the last century, the dialect has been heavily influenced by neighbouring dialects spoken in the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, such as Jianghuai Mandarin (江淮官话), the Suzhou Wu dialect (吴语苏州话), and the Ningbo Wu dialect (吴语宁波话), in addition to two other, more distant dialects, Cantonese (广东话) and Northern Mandarin (北方官话). Most native speakers of Shanghai Chinese are in fact descendants of immigrants from Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces who moved to Shanghai in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. More recently, the position of Shanghai Chinese has been eroded with the influx of immigrants from other parts of the country and the widespread adoption of Standard Chinese.

Shiwilu (a.k.a. Jebero) is a critically endangered language from Peruvian Amazonia and one of the two members of the Kawapanan linguistic family. Most of its nearly 30 remaining fluent speakers live in and around the village of Jeberos (District of Jeberos, Province of Alto Amazonas, Loreto Region), at approximately 5° S, 75° W.

The documentation of Shiwilu is scarce and no survey grammar is available. Until very recently, the only trained linguist who had worked on Shiwilu was John Bendor-Samuel, who carried out fieldwork in 1955–1956 and completed a doctoral thesis in 1958 (see Bendor-Samuel 1981 [1958]). An abridged version of the thesis, which includes an outline of the phonology, was published as Bendor-Samuel (1961). Whereas recent publications have focused on the social position of the Shiwilu language (Valenzuela 2010), morpho-syntactic aspects (Valenzuela 2011), and a formal demonstration of its family affiliation with the Shawi language (a.k.a. Chayahuita) (Valenzuela Bismarck 2011), the present article is the first account of its sound system since the work by Bendor-Samuel.

The lexical tone and intonation contrasts in the Limburgish dialect of Maastricht are remarkable in a number of ways. While a falling pitch contour on an IP-medial syllable signals a non-declarative intonation, on an IP-final syllable it signals a declarative intonation. In addition, although there is a binary tone contrast (Accent 1 vs. Accent 2) and four nuclear intonation contours, only three intonation contours exist for nuclear syllables with Accent 2, while in IP-final position only two intonation contours exist for nuclear syllables with Accent 1, so that the full set of four intonation contours is only observable in IP-medial nuclear syllables with Accent 1. The context-dependent function of the pitch fall and the asymmetries are explained by a grammar in which the OCP is enforced absolutely, and the number of tones per syllable is restricted to two, unless the three tones each represent a different morpheme: OCP, Realise.orph≫#TTT.

In order to account for the accentual and rhythmical structure of English, a binary-branching prosodic constituent structur is assumed, in which minimally the syllable and the foot must be headed. Feet are potentially marked as accented. This representation makes it possible to describe the prominence patterns of word groups as resulting from three accent deletion rules, the Compound Rule, the Initial Accent Deletion Rule and the Rhythm Rule. It was shown that the structural change effected by Initial Accent Deletion cannot be expressed in theories which represent stress as a relative concept. Moreover, this rule, which like the Compound rule is a lexical rule, provided evidence for the existence of a stratum in the lexical phonology of English in which compounding and so-called ClassII derivation take place. The Rhythm Rule is a postlexical rule, which was shown to apply to the output of the other two rules. Without the aid of any conditions or constraints, it accounted effortlessly for the stress-shift data presented in the recent literature. It could moreover be shown that apparent cases of stress shift in unaccented speech (in which the Rhythm Rule does not apply) should not in fact be viewed as the output of any stress-shift rule at all, but should be explained as the effect of preboundary lengthening as applying to the different constituents in the prosodic hierarchy. It was argued that an analysis of sentence accentuation whereby focused constituents have to be assigned accents can run into problems that do not exist in a ‘deaccenting’ analysis, in which nonfocused constituents are deprived of their accents. Finally, it was argued that English, unlike Dutch, lacks phonological rules that refer to primary word stress, and that, at best, primary stress may reveal itself in low-level timing distinctions.

Nubi is a language with culminative word prominence, spoken in Uganda and Kenya. The prominence, or accent, falls within a right-edge three-syllable window, and at the phrasal level deaccenting and rhythm-related accent shift occur in specific phonological and morphological contexts. Since accent is used to express morphological categories, and deaccenting and accent shift are morphologically conditioned, the functional load of accent is comparable to that of morphologically conditioned stress in other languages. Accented syllables are associated with H tones, with default L tones appearing between them. Typologically, Nubi is not a stress-accent language, because unlike for example English, it has no stress distinctions independently of the distinction between accented and unaccented syllables. It is also non-tonal, because accent marking is not lexically idiosyncratic, and because it has no option other than to supply a H tone is accented syllables, it is unlike a prototypical intonation language that has pitch accents with discoursal meanings.

The word prosody of the dialect of Cologne includes a phonological contrast in stressed syllables which at first sight might either reflect a ternary quantity contrast or a binary quantity contrast plus a tone contrast. There are differences in duration as well as F0 between Accent 1 (Schärfung) and Accent 2, along with differences in the intensity profiles of the syllables. It is argued that the contrast is one between an unspecified lexical tone (T) (Accent 2) and no tone (Accent 1), and that the lexical tone assimilates to an intonational tone. We show that a ternary quantity contrast (i) cannot capture the difference between Accent 1 and Accent 2; (ii) would imply an otherwise unattested distributional confinement to the syllable coda of geminate consonants and (iii) would imply unexpected intonation contours in bimoraic syllables. By contrast, a tonal analysis readily accounts for the phonetic and distributional facts.