ABSTRACT: Tonal Feet

William R. Leben

Stanford University

Tonal melodies, like segmental melodies, have left and right edges. Autosegmental analyses have established morpheme-based tonal melodies in a wide variety of languages. These melodies tend to be very simple—often just a single element, e.g. H, as in many Bantu languages. But sometimes tonal melodies can includes as many as three elements, as argued for Mende by Leben 1973 and for Kukuya by Hyman 1987. This presentation examines whether these melodies have any internal structure, and the answer proposed is that they do. The internal constituent is called the tonal foot.

Tonal feet are harder to document than metrical feet since metrical feet by definition contain only one stress per foot, while the constituency of tonal feet is not normally so neat or obvious. An approach that seems to work is to probe for tonal feet by showing how certain assumptions about their existence and constituency solve descriptive anomalies that have cropped up time and again in the study of lexical tone languages. As a result, tonal feet, like metrical feet, are shown to be either binary or unbounded and either left- or right-headed.

We can discern the existence of tonal feet by establishing the occurring and non-occurring melodies that can be characterized in terms of them—analogously to the way that melodic possibilities have been found to characterize morphemes in some languages, like Mende (Leben, 1978) and Kukuya (Hyman, 1987). Tonal feet are shown to be binary in Hausa borrowings (Leben, 1997) and in Northern Mande (Creissels and Grégoire 1993, as reanalyzed here) and unbounded in Isixhosa (Cassimjee and Kisseberth 1997) and in other languages analyzed there.

The descriptive advantage of tonal feet is that they explain distributional facts that up to now have gone unnoticed or unexplained. In Hausa borrowings from English (Leben 1997), binary tonal feet help to explain how English stresses are accommodated tonally in Hausa. Words like gwámnà ‘governor’ have a HL pattern, closely resembling the intonation of the English source. The same is true of tânkíifàa ‘timekeeper,’ where there are two stresses in the English source, each one realized as a HL pattern in the Hausa borrowing. By contrast, words like máasínjà and Nàjéeríyàa, though they also end with a HL melody, exhibit a one-syllable delay from where English declarative intonation would drop from High to Low. In English, the drop from H to L is after the syllable mess of ‘messenger,’ and after the syllable jeer of ‘Nigeria.’ In Hausa, the drop is one syllable to the right of these. The effect is shown by Leben 1997 to be totally general in Hausa, across several hundred examples. The explanation for this discrepancy is simple, if we assume that Hausa assigns binary left-headed tonal feet to the words, beginning on the syllable corresponding to the stressed syllable English, i.e. on gwám of gwámnà, máa of máasínjà, and on jée of Nàjéeríyàa.

This gives the following tonal foot assignments, where parentheses mark the left and right edges of the tonal foot: (gwámnà) (tân)(kíifàa) (máasín)jà Nà(jéerí)yàa. The tonal foot constituency brings out the generalization. The tonal feet of the first two examples all have the tonal pattern HL. The tonal feet of the last two examples all have the tonal pattern level H. The difference can be described easily in terms of the position of these tonal feet: a Hausa tonal foot is level H before unfooted material (e.g. the final unfooted syllables of (máasín)jà and Nà(jéerí)yàa), and it is HL elsewhere.

Creissels and Gr¾goire 1993 offer a new analysis of an extensive number of northern Mande languages, positing double tone marks in some cases. In the present talk, the double tone marks are shown to represent multiple tonal feet in a single word. The tonal foot approach simplifies the analysis considerably.

One of the key problems that has been found with the Obligatory Contour Principle is that languages sometimes have more contrasting tonal possibilities than the OCP would permit. For example, Odden 1986 notes the following apparent exceptions to the OCP in KiShambaa, which he analyzes as in the top autosegmental representations:

(a)	/ nyoka / ‘snake’	vs.	(b)	/ ngoto / ‘sheep’
	\ /			| |
	H			H H
	Surface forms:
	nyÙk«			ngÙ^!tÙ
	[ ^¾^¾]			[ ^¾¾ ]

But the theory of tonal feet suggests this reanalysis, where tonal feet are enclosed in parentheses:

(a)

/ nyoka / ‘snake’ ( H )

vs.

(b)

/ ngoto / ‘sheep’ ( H )( H )

That is, in KiShamba, the domain of the OCP is the tonal foot, and downstep is inserted between tonal feet. This analysis is analogous to the well accepted metrical analysis of English, which assigns one stress foot to the (a) example below, and two stress feet to the (b) example. That is, for English, foot structure is unpredictably different for these two words. This is really remarkably similar to the analysis of tonal foot structure in KiShambaa suggested above.

(a)

/ attic / ( x .)

vs.

(b)

/ aztec / ( x)( x )

Finally, tonal feet are shown to provide a convenient description for the patterns of reduced tonal contrast that are found in ideophones in Yoruba (Awoyale 2000) and Hausa (Newman 2000) and in Hausa plurals.

Tonal feet form a part of a general theory of tonal constituents. While focusing here on tonal feet because they are to date the most obscure part of such a theory, the talk suggests what a theory of tonal constituents would look like. It very much resembles the optimal domains theory of Cassimjee and Kisseberth 1997, which offers new explanations for tonal behavior in Bantu. This presentation shows how this theory can be applied fruitfully to account for different sorts of tonal phenomena in languages of West Africa.

References

Awoyale, Y. 2000. The phonological structure of Yoruba ideophones. In H. E. Wolff & O. D. Gensler, eds., Proceedings of the Second World Congress of African Linguistics, Leipzig, 1997. Cologne: Ruediger Koeppe Verlag, 293-309.

Cassimjee, F., and C. W. Kisseberth. 1998. Optimal Domains Theory and Bantu Tonology: A Case study from Isixhosa and Shingazidja. In L. M. Hyman and C. W. Kisseberth, eds., Theoretical Aspects of Bantu Tone. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 33-132.

Creissels, D., and C. Grégoire. 1993. La notion du ton marqué dans l’analyse d’une opposition tonale binaire: Le cas du mandingue. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 14.107-154.

Hyman, L. M. 1987. Prosodic domains in Kukuya. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 5:311-333.

Leben, W. R. 1973. Suprasegmental Phonology. M.I.T. dissertation. Garland Press, 1980.

Leben, W. R. 1997. Tonal feet and the adaptation of English borrowings into Hausa. Studies in African Linguistics 25: 139-154.

Leben, W. R.1997. “Tonal feet and the adaptation of English borrowings into Hausa.” Studies in African Linguistics 25: 139-154.

Newman, P. 2000. The Hausa Language: An Encyclopedic Reference Grammar. New Haven: Yale University Press.