Invited Talk by Jackson Kellog

Phrase languages in prosodic typology
Jackson Kellogg (BU)

   A traditional approach to word-prosodic typology treats stress and tone as binary parameters.  Less is understood about the typology of phrase-level prosody, in particular intonation.  In “stress-accentual” languages, especially West Germanic, word stress is cued by an intonational pitch accent and utterances are demarcated by phrasal boundary tones.  In this talk, I identify a range of contrasting prosodic qualities in another group of languages, subsets of which have been labeled “edge-prominence” languages or “intonational phrase” languages.  These include French, Korean, Persian, Tashlhiyt Berber, Austronesian languages, Ethio-Semitic languages, and languages of South Asia.  Qualities that many such languages share include (1) word stress that is absent or relatively “weak”, (2) a word-sized prosodic constituent that is demarcated by a rising F0 contour, (3) a relative instability in the alignment of intonational tones, and (4) a strategy of marking narrow focus via prosodic boundary insertion and post-focal compression.  I argue that analytic details about such languages that are sometimes fixated on in this literature, such as whether word stress is present and whether intonational tones constitute pitch accents, obscure an overall unity that may best be captured by positing fewer distinct types.  Finally, I observe that many such languages display a head-final SOV syntax, and I speculate whether this is purely coincidental.  I adopt the label “phrase language” for this prosodic type, and I conclude with future directions for refining prosodic typology.