Lexical tone contrast in Izon as ubiquitous floating tone

This paper establishes the lexical tone contrasts in the Nigerian language Izon, focusing on evidence for floating tone. Many tonal languages show effects of floating tone, though typically in a restricted way, such as occurring with only a minority of morphemes, or restricted to certain grammatical environments. For Izon, the claim here is that all lexical items sponsor floating tone, making it ubiquitous across the lexicon and as common as pre-associated tone. The motivation for floating tone comes from the tonal patterns of morphemes in isolation and within tone groups. Based on these patterns, all lexical morphemes are placed into one of four tone classes defined according to which floating tones they end in. This paper provides extensive empirical support for this analysis and discusses several issues which emerge under ubiquitous floating tone. Issues include the principled allowance of OCP(T) violations, and the propensity for word-initial vowels and low tone to coincide.

Development OF Phrase-Level Prosody from Infancy to Late Childhood

This chapter reviews the state-of-the-art research on phrase-level prosodic development. The chapter first discusses prosodic variation in early vocalizations, its communicative connotations, and perception of tonal patterns and prosodic phrases in infancy. Second, it reviews the main findings on development in the inventory of phonologically distinct tonal patterns (i.e. pitch accents, boundary tones) and in prosodic phrasing and rhythm from the one-word stage to the multi-word stage in speech production. Third, it considers developmental patterns at the interface between prosody and information structure and in the expression of emotions and epistemic meanings from both a production and a comprehension perspective. In the chapter’s treatment of these topics, it reviews proposals for factors that shape the rate and route of development where appropriate. Finally, the chapter suggests directions for future research.

Minimalism

The static sounds of popular music, especially rock <ap>‘n’ roll, influenced a new generation of composers. Rejecting both classical and contemporary formal procedures in composition, minimalist composers created new works whose structures became apparent to the listener as the music slowly unfolded. Beginning with La Monte Young, the master of the drone, a few composers began to simplify their art in an effort to connect to the listening public. The percussion music presented herein exhibits many of the traits that define minimalism: the constant repetitive pulse, reduced forces, slowly changing rhythmic modules, and canonic constructs. A brief look at Terry Riley’s iconic work, In C, leads to an in-depth examination of composer Steve Reich’s most popular minimalist work, Drumming. In it, the listener can hear the slowly unfolding structure of the work as well as the psychoacoustic phenomena caused by the interaction of rhythmic and tonal patterns. The chapter concludes with an examination of works by the Danish composer and theorist Per Nørgård and the American composer James Tenney.

The computational nature of stress assignment

While computational studies of stress patterns as phonotactics have yielded restrictive characterizations of stress (Rogers et al., 2013) with provably correct learning procedures (Heinz, 2009), an outstanding question is the nature of stress assignment as a function which assigns stress to an underlying bare string of syllables. This paper fills this gap by locating stress patterns with respect to the subsequential class of functions (Mohri, 1997), which are argued to be important for phonology in that the vast majority of phonological functions fall within the subsequential boundary (Heinz & Lai, 2013; Chandlee, 2014), with the notable exception of tone and vowel harmony (Jardine, 2016; McCollum et al., under review). The main result is that—while most, if not all quantity insensitive (QI) stress systems are subsequential functions—the same does not hold for quantity sensitive (QS) systems. Counter-intuitively, so-called default-to-opposite QS patterns are subsequential, but default-to-same QS patterns are provably not. It also supports the claim of Jardine (2016) that certain tonal patterns are non-sequential because their suprasegmental nature allows for more a more powerful computation. As stress assignment is also suprasegmental, the existence of non-sequential stress functions adds evidence for this conclusion.

Word stress and sentence prosody in Greek

The present study concerns the prosodic structure of Greek as a function of word stress and focus as well as statement and yes/no question sentence type distinctions. It is argued that the word stress distinction has a local domain whereas focus, statement and question distinctions have a global domain. Word stress has a lengthening effect on all segmental constituents of the stressed syllable and especially on vowel in combination with an intensity increase whereas the tonal pattern is variable in accordance with the global context. The focus distinction has no lengthening effect locally and may show variable tonal patterns locally and globally depending on the global context. The statement and yes/no sentence type distinction has variable prosodic patterns locally and globally and shows multiple interactions with variable focus applications.

On the embodied meaning of emotional responses to music: A semiotic perspective

Previous attempts to find meaning in emotional responses to music often begin with analysis of dynamic tonal patterns, with observation of the emotional behavior of listeners or with self-reports of emotional feelings. In this study, we begin with a somewhat detailed description of physical processes in the human auditory system that lead to the activation of processes in the autonomic nervous system, which produce embodied emotional responses to environmental challenges. We then propose an answer to the question: Why were some of the same embodied responses that were originally adapted to meet the challenges of self-preservation and self-perpetuation in the course of human evolution coopted to serve as responses to perceived dynamic patterns in music? We find that a likely answer to this question involves uncertainties in the possible outcomes of antecedent or consequent musical events.

Uncovering Tonal and Temporal Correlates of Phrasal Prominence in Medʉmba

Characterizing prosodic prominence relations in African tone languages is notoriously difficult, as typical acoustic cues to prominence (changes in F0, increases in intensity, etc.) can be difficult to distinguish from those which mark tonal contrasts. The task of establishing prominence is further complicated by the fact that tone, an important cue to syllable prominence and prosodic boundaries cross-linguistically, plays many roles in African languages: tones often signal lexical contrasts, can themselves be morphemes, and can also interact in key ways with prosody. The present study builds on phonological generalizations about tonal patterns in Medʉmba, a Grassfields Bantu language, and uses the speech cycling paradigm to investigate relative timing of syllables varying in phrase-level prominence. Specifically, we investigate timing asymmetries between syllables hypothesized to occur at the edge of a phonological phrase, which carry a high phrase accent, and those in phrase-medial position, which do not. Results indicate significant differences in the temporal alignment of accented versus non-accented syllables, with accented syllables occurring significantly closer to positions established as prominence-attracting in previous speech cycling research. We show that these findings cannot be attributed to differences in tone alone. Findings demonstrate the importance of relative temporal alignment as a correlate of prosodic prominence. Findings also point to increased duration as a phonetic property which distinguishes between syllables bearing phrasal prominence from those which do not.