Contact-related variation in tone and tone-alignment patterns

by Mary E. Beckman, Ohio State University

Current descriptions of contact-related prosodic re-organization 
often refer to categories such as "tone" versus "stress" -- terms 
that we now know apply to very heterogenous groups of prosodic 
systems which were rather simplistically lumped together in 
traditional typologies of tone and accent.  The dimensions of 
variation that the traditional typologies probably meant to capture 
can be translated into the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) framework by 
asking two questions about the inventory of tone specifications in a 
language variety and about the metrical structures to which they attach.  
First, is the inventory of pitch contours that contrast short utterances 
in the language variety composed primarily of tones that are specified 
in the lexicon (so-called "tone languages") or are most tone shapes 
morphemes in their own right (so-called "intonation languages")?  
Second, what are the constraints that determine tune-text alignment 
at the lowest levels of the prosodic heirarchy?  For example, are some 
parts of each utterance tune necessarily anchored to rhythmically 
prominent syllables (so-called "stress languages"), or are all tones 
anchored exclusively to prosodic group edges or to rhythmically 
undifferentiated culminative syllables (what Beckman, 1986, called 
"non-stress accent")?  This talk has two aims.  It will briefly review 
some of the phenomena that have prompted us to recast the typology of 
prosodic systems in this way, and it will apply the revamped typology 
to several cases of contact-related variation in languages in East 
Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean.