Overview of Prosody

Abstract

Prosody, in terms of theories of phonological representation, refers to syllabicity, length, syllable organisation, stress and related concepts, and certain sequencing relations between segment sequences , usually between adjacent syllables. Skeletal positions: The problem. One of the basic questions of prosody is how segmental length should be represented. Length could be treated as a binary feature and is so treated in the SPE theory, analogous to nasality or voicing. However, it has long been recognised that to a considerable extent, long vowels behave the same as two short vowels and long consonants often behave like two short consonants. This fact is so widely recognised that it has become standard for long segments to be written aa, uu, tt, nn and so on. An example of this patterning is found in the fact that in Yawelmani, long vowels are shortened before clusters of two consonants as well as before geminate (long) consonants (see Chapter 7). This rule interacts with an epenthesis rule which inserts i or u (depending on the preceding vowel) between the first two of three consonants. This shortening rule explains why the underlying long vowel of /Üa:ml-al/ and /Üa:ml-it/ is short on the surface˜[Üamlal] 'help (dubitative)', [Üaml-it] 'help (passive aorist)'. Examples like /Üa:ml-hin/, /Üa:ml-k'a/ which surface as [Üa:mil-hin] 'help (nonfuture)', [Üa:mil-k'a] 'help (imperative)' motivate the underlying long vowel. We find the same shortening before a long consonant, thus [dol:-al], [dol:-ut] 'climb (dubitative, passive aorist)', cf. [do:lul-hun], [do:lul-k'a] 'climb (nonfuture, imperative). This shortening makes sense if the long [l:] of [dol:-al] is really two l's (and this is how they are traditionally spelled), thus /do:ll-hin/, /do:ll-al/. Cinching the argument for treating long cononants as two identical consonants is the fact that they can be separated by epenthesis, as in [do:lul-hun], [do:lul-k'a]. If long consonants are single consonants with a feature [+long], there is no expectation that they will act the same as two independent consonants in triggering pre-cluster chortening˜this would require the disjunctive conditioning environment {CC,C:}. The change to C i VC i before another consonant is even less compre-hensible. A further example of the phonological equivalence of long consonants and consonant clusters is the conditioning environment of gradation in Finnish. Certain phonological changes affect postvocalic consonants which are followed by VCC, one of which is that /p/ becomes [v] ˜ see Chapter 5 exercise 6 for further data on Finnish gradation. The facts of Finnish similarly show that …