Tone and prosodic recursion in Degema nouns and noun phrases

Abstract This paper presents the first systematic study of tone in nouns and noun phrases in Degema. From a database of approximately 1,000 nouns, we find that nouns fall into three main tone patterns: /L-L/ (48% of nouns), /H-H/ (18%), and /L-HH/ (13%). This last case is theoretically important in that it includes cases where two separate H tones associate to the same tone-bearing unit, in violation of the Obligatory Contour Principle. In isolation, nouns are subject to two basic tone rules which alter their underlying forms: downstep is inserted between two final H’s (e.g. /H-H/ → [H↓H]), and H is inserted at the end of an all-low sequence (e.g. /L-L/ → [LH]). The combined effect of these rules is that virtually all nouns and noun phrases have a pitch change. Further, we catalog tonal effects found on nouns in 33 distinct modificational contexts within the noun phrase. We attribute these tonal effects to whether modifiers plus the noun form phonological phrases (φ) or phonological words (ɷ), and whether they form recursive prosodic structures, e.g. of the type ( ( A )φ B )φ. By positing recursive structure, we can localize tonal effects to an outermost prosodic layer (e.g. φ[+max]), innermost layer (e.g. φ[+min]), non-inner or outermost layers (e.g. φ[-max]), or to the prosodic category as a whole (i.e. all layers of a φ).