TAPS -
Typology of African Prosodic Systems
Universität Bielefeld
May 18 - 20, 2001
The TAPS workshop will cover the following content and methodology areas, concentrating in this first meeting mainly on tone systems and their relation to other areas of prosody:
- Content:
- Types of tone language (Discrete, Terrace, or Pitch accent languages)
- Types of tone (level or contour), inventories of level and contour tones (HL, LH, HM. LM, MH, L!H, ...) and inventory sizes (2, 3, 4, 5, ...)
- Tonal processes (spreading, assimilation, simplification, deletion, ...)
- Automatic and non-automatic tonal downstep, floating tones
- Downtrend phenomena (downdrift, upstep, upsweep, suspension of downdrift, ...)
- Functional load of tone (lexical, grammatical), tonogenesis, ...
- Other prosodic features in relation to tone
- Prosody of intonation languages spoken in Africa (e.g. English, French, Portuguese, ...)
- Methodology:
- Tonal category systems
- Methods for eliciting tonal data
- Tone transcription and annotation in language documentation
- Formalisms for modelling and representing tone
- Computational models for tone systems
We intend this TAPS workshop to be the first in a series of workshops
on the topic, and will discuss future plans on this both with the workshop
participants and with the West African Linguistics Society.