Tuwuli tones and melodies

4/10/2021: Talk at ACAL 51-52, University of Florida.

Slides and recordings.

This project analyzes Tuwuli tonal alternation in noun class markers (Harley 2005) with a melody analysis (Zoll 2003) and an accentual analysis (Hyman 2006), in an optimality theoretical framework (Prince and Smolensky 1993). Tuwuli has two tonemes, H(igh) and L(ow). Based on that the prefix is L-toned before L-/H-initial roots, and H-toned before H-initial ones, we propose a tonally underspecified prefix as the underlying form of the noun class marker, which copies the first toneme from the root. We generalize the underlying tonal inventories of Tuwuli nouns to five melodies: H, HL, L, LH, LHL. Each melody in the underlying representation maps to prosodic words marked with tone accents and outputs the tonal patterns in the surface representation. Empirically, we provide the first tonal analysis of Tuwuli and formalize its tonal alternation with OT. Theoretically, our accentual analysis improves the proposal in Hyman 2006, suggests that tone accents can appear on both edges of a prosodic word, and calls for reconsideration of accentual marking in tone melodies.