Compound Intonation Units in Totoli
Postlexical prosody and the prosody-syntax interface
Author(s)
Bracks, Christoph
Collection
Knowledge Unlatched (KU)Language
EnglishAbstract
This book is an investigation into aspects of prosody, intonation and the prosody-syntax interface in Totoli, an endangered Austronesian language. With a strongly data-driven approach, the study integrates a combination of experimental evidence from both production and perception with corpus-based evidence through descriptive and inferential statistics. The study takes the prime structuring unit of speech – the Intonation Unit – as its principal unit of investigation. It presents a thorough description of the IU, develops an intonational model of it, and investigates the syntactic units it contains. The author argues that the data is best analysed by assuming recursive embedding of Intonation Units into Compound Intonation Units. This research represents a significant advancement in our understanding of the nature of prosodic systems found in the languages of the region and in intonational systems in general. It is one of the few investigations into the intonation of Austronesian languages and its analytical proposals are relevant both to prosodic theory and to phonological typology.
Keywords
Language Arts & Disciplines; LinguisticsDOI
10.5281/zenodo.10559070ISBN
9783985540945, 9783961104369Publisher
Language Science PressPublisher website
https://langsci-press.org/Publication date and place
2024Grantor
Imprint
Language Science PressClassification
linguistics