[TACOL] A. Tallman, The phonetics of tone sandhi in Chácobo (Pano) from morph to utterance
Séminaire Terrains, Analyse et COmparaison des Langues (TACOL)
La première séance de notre séminaire TACOL en 2023 aura lieu mardi 14 février à 14h30, sur place (salle de réunion 311, Campus CNRS de Villejuif) et sur Zoom (ID de réunion : 957 2927 8932 ; Code secret : Su6MiU).
Nous aurons le plaisir d’écouter Adam J. R. Tallman (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena).
Titre de la présentation :
The phonetics of tone sandhi in Chácobo (Pano) from morph to utterance
Résumé :
Chácobo, a southern Pano language of the northern Bolivian Amazon, is a tonal language with three types of lexical tonal specifications on syllables: toneless, LH, LHH. The language displays a tone sandhi process whereby adjacent LH.LH tones reduce to LL.H (kaʂǎ=mǎ → kàʂà=má ‘play-CAUS‘ make him/her/them play’). Tallman (2018, 2021b) describes the process as obligatory at junctures within a subspan of the verb stem, but optional outside of this domain. This talk provides a statistical of the phonetics of tone sandhi in the “optional” cases to determine whether it is more likely at certain boundaries rather than others and to assess the effects of other factors, such as bigram morph frequency and the type of constituency boundary. In typical studies of boundary effects and phonetic reduction, abstract and indeterminate categories such as (phonological or morphosyntactic) “word” and “phrase” are used as variables (Kilbourn-Ceron & Sonderegger 2017; Seifart et al. 2021). However, such categories are not cross-linguistically conmeasurable, the identification of “word” and “phrase” boundaries can vary depending on which diagnostics are prioritized (Russell 1999; Schiering et al. 2010; Croft 2010; Bickel & Zuñiga 2017; Tallman 2021a). I present a solution to this problem by tagging morphosyntactic elements with positions in an abstract template called a “planar structure” – a coding device that does not presuppose a specific constituency analysis. This allows us to assess phonetic reduction at junctures which can reflect competing hypotheses with respect to what the word or phrase or any other constituent are in a language (coded as domains over the planar structure). This talk will present a pilot study showing how tone sandhi can be studied with respect to a more fine-grained, and cross-linguistically conmeasurable, representation of sentence structure.
References :
Bickel, B., & Zuñiga, F. (2017). The ‘word’ in polysynthetic languages: phonological and syntactic challenges. In M. Fortascue, M. Mithun, & N. Evans (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis (pp. 158-186). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Croft, W. (2010). Radical Construction Grammar. In T. Hoffman, & G. Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar (pp. 211-232). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Russell, K. (1999). What’s with all these long words anyway? In P. Bar-El, R.-M. Dechaine, & C. Reinholtz (Ed.), Papers from the Workshop on Structure & Constituency in Native American languages (pp. 119-130). MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics 17.
Schiering, R., Balthasar, B., & Hildebrandt, K. A. (2010). The prosodic word is not universal, but emergent. Journal of Linguistics, 46(3), 657-709.
Seifart, F., Strunk, J., Danielson, S., Hartmann, I., Pakendorf, B., Wichmann, S., . . . Bickel, B. (2021). The extent and degree of utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from 10 languages. Linguistics Vanguard.
Sonderegger, O. K.-C. (2018). Boundary phenomena and variability in Japanese high vowel devoicing. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 36, 175-217.
Tallman, A. J. (2018). A Grammar of Chácobo, a southern Pano language of the northern Bolivian Amazon. Austin: University of Texas at Austin.
Tallman, A. J. (2021a). Analysis and falsifiability in practice. Theoretical linguistics, 45(2), 95-112.
Tallman, A. J. (2021b). Constituency and coincidence in Chácobo (Pano). Studies in Language, 45(2), 321-382.
Tallman, A. J., Auderset, S., & Uchihara, H. (Eds.). (forthcoming). Constituency and Coincidence in the Americas. Berlin: Language Sciences Press.
Croft, W. (2010). Radical Construction Grammar. In T. Hoffman, & G. Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar (pp. 211-232). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Russell, K. (1999). What’s with all these long words anyway? In P. Bar-El, R.-M. Dechaine, & C. Reinholtz (Ed.), Papers from the Workshop on Structure & Constituency in Native American languages (pp. 119-130). MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics 17.
Schiering, R., Balthasar, B., & Hildebrandt, K. A. (2010). The prosodic word is not universal, but emergent. Journal of Linguistics, 46(3), 657-709.
Seifart, F., Strunk, J., Danielson, S., Hartmann, I., Pakendorf, B., Wichmann, S., . . . Bickel, B. (2021). The extent and degree of utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from 10 languages. Linguistics Vanguard.
Sonderegger, O. K.-C. (2018). Boundary phenomena and variability in Japanese high vowel devoicing. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 36, 175-217.
Tallman, A. J. (2018). A Grammar of Chácobo, a southern Pano language of the northern Bolivian Amazon. Austin: University of Texas at Austin.
Tallman, A. J. (2021a). Analysis and falsifiability in practice. Theoretical linguistics, 45(2), 95-112.
Tallman, A. J. (2021b). Constituency and coincidence in Chácobo (Pano). Studies in Language, 45(2), 321-382.
Tallman, A. J., Auderset, S., & Uchihara, H. (Eds.). (forthcoming). Constituency and Coincidence in the Americas. Berlin: Language Sciences Press.
