Notes from Christian DiCanio's talk

In case you missed our meeting today, here are some notes from Dr. DiCanio's talk.

---

Tonal patterns in Mixtec

Coarticulation and prosody condition phonetic patterns of segmental variation. Is there intonation in tonal languages?

Prosody can influence tone: Pitch accent, boundary tones, prosodic prominence.

Stressed syllables have greater prosodic lengthening under focus than non-stressed syllables. Intionational pitch accents align with stressed syllables in non-tonal languages.

Mixtec - 9 possible tones on non-final syllables, only 5 possible tones on final syllables.

Across focus constructions, can see stress effects.

Stressed syllables lengthened more than unstressed syllables.

Under focus, the whole word lengthens, but what lengthens most is the onset of the final consonant.

Duration isn't directly correlated with tonal effects

Tone

Contrastive focus: Greatest degree of non-final tone raising. Less consistency with what argument focus does to tones compared to contrastive focus.

Some instances of prosody influencing tone!

The effect of stress position on tone varies with melody

distance between tones.