LUCL Colloquium 14 January

On 14 January 2010, Charles Kisseberth will give a presentation during an extra LUCL Colloquium. The title of his talk is 'New Perspectives on Phonological Phrasing in Chimwiini'.

General Information

Contact

The LUCL Colloquium organising committee consists of:

• Linda Badan
• Ronny Boogaart
• Johanneke Caspers
• Rebecca Voll
  

Abstract

Chimwiini, a Bantu language closely related to Kiswahili but differing from it prosodically in critical ways, has been a key data source for the study of the phonology- syntax interface since the mid-1970's. The study of phonological phrasing in Chimwiini has developed in a progressively deepening fashion: 

(i) the original observations in Kisseberth and Abasheikh (1974) demonstrating that vowel length alternations could be explained only by recognizing the existence of phrases;

(ii) Selkirk's 1986 account of these alternations in terms of a combination of the notion of the Latin Stress Rule and a phrasing principle that aligns the right edge of a lexical maximal projection with the right edge of a phonological phrase;

(iii) my discovery this decade that the distribution of accent in Chimwiini is an independent source of evidence for phrasing and that other factors besides syntax are relevant to the construction of phrasing.

Recently it has become possible to renew field work on Chimwiini and additional aspects of the complex prosody of this language have become clear. Perhaps most remarkable is the extent to which phrasing determines the distribution of accent (H tone), but (apparently) does not alone determine its precise location nor its relative pitch height. The role of focus/ emphasis is obviously crucial to phrasal formation. But this same factor is also also critical to the precise manifestation of the accent. It remains an open question as to whether there there is any way to reduce the tricky issues of the manifestation of accent entirely to the issue of phrasing. One possible line of attack will be discussed.