Speaker: Charles W. Kisseberth (Emeritus, University of Illinois and Tel Aviv University)
Title: Prosody and Phonological Phrasing in Chimwiini
Time: Wed 4/13, 5-7pm, Location TBA
In this paper we explore the fundamentals of the prosody and phrasing of sentences in Chimwiini, a Bantu language closely related to Swahili. We look first at the pattern of vowel length alternations at the word level, a system that Selkirk (1986) analyzed in terms of an abstract system of stress that features the Latin Stress Rule plus a principle that shortens unstressed vowels. Then we look at the system of accent which, in the default case assigns penult accent (H tone), but final accent in certain mostly morphosyntactic environements.
It turns out that both the stress system and the accent are phrasal in nature and work in exactly the same phrasal units. After demonstrating this point, we summarize the main principles that define the phrasing of a Chimwiini sentence: Align-XP R (align the right edge of a lexical maximal projection with the right edge of a phonological phrase) and Align-Foc R (align the right edge of a focused element with the right edge of a phonological phrase). We discusss briefly some phenomena that may be subcases of Align-Foc R or related to it in terms of the pattern of behavior.
The final portion of the paper explores how final accent is realized in Chimwiini sentences and suggests that the essential principle is this: final accent is located on the final syllable of any phonological phrase that contains the trigger of final accent. To make this principle succeed, it turns out that we need a third phrasing principle: Wrap-XP (all the elements in an XP must appear inside a single phonological phrase) plus recursive phrasing.