Speaker: Charles W. Kisseberth (Emeritus, University of Illinois and Tel Aviv University)
Title: Focus, Phrasing, and Prosody in Chimwiini
Time: Thursday, April 14, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461
It has been known for forty years that sentences in Chimwiini (a Bantu language closely related to Swahili spoken originally in the town of Brava in southern Somalia, but now distributed over a diaspora that includes Kenya, the United Kingdom, and the United States) are exhaustively parsed into a sequence of phonological phrases. The evidence for this claim originally derived solely from the complicated pattern of vowel length alternations in the language. In brief, only one long vowel can occur in a phrase and it must be located in either the penult or the antepenult syllable of the phrase. An expected long vowel in any other syllable in the phrase must shorten. However, it is not necessary for a phrase to have a long vowel.
It has been known since Selkirk’s 1986 analysis that phrases in Chimwiini are formed in considerable part on the basis of syntactic structure, specifically by the principle that we shall label Align-XP R: the right edge of a lexical maximal projection is located at the right edge of a Phonological Phrase.
In 2001 it was discovered that “accent” (High tone) is a second, independent source of evidence for phrasing. The Chimwiini accentual system is simple, but with some complexity in how it plays itself out. There is one accent/H tone per phrase, and it resides on the last prosodic word of the phrase. Accent is on the penult syllable in the default case, but on the final syllable in the presence of a small number of final-accent triggers.
The accentual evidence also led to the discovery of a critical role for focus (or more generally emphasis) in phrasing. Specifically, the presence of focus on a word requires that this word be at the right edge of a phonological phrase (indeed, in some cases the requirement is stronger: the focused word must be final in any phonological phrase that contains it). A careful examination of the focus evidence (as well as certain phenomena that seem to have parallels to focus in terms of their behavior) provides quite subtle evidence about the issue of whether phrasing in Chimwiini is recursive or not. The focus evidence also turns out to have interesting ramifications for the intonation of yes-no questions in Chimwiini, a matter that we will look at briefly, time permitting.