Approaching the prosodic system of Shǐxīng

Ekaterina Chirkova (1) , Alexis Michaud (2)

1 CRLAO - Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale
2 LACITO - Langues et civilisations à tradition orale

The present approach to the prosodic system of Shǐxīng, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the South-West of China, aims to bring out the combinatorial properties of its lexical tones through systematic manipulations of nouns and verbs. Shǐxīng is phonologically monosyllabic, with two types of monosyllables: (i) lexically specified for tone (roots), exhibiting a three-way tonal contrast between high (H), low (L) and falling (HL) tones; and (ii) toneless (affixes and clitics). Units of two syllables or more (words and phrases) are formed out of these two types of monosyllables– viz. tonally specified and toneless–, and exhibit three contrastive tone patterns, similar to those of monosyllables– viz. /H/, /L/ and /HL/. The domain for contrastive tone patterns in Shǐxīng obtains at the intersection of lexicon and grammar; it is the phonological word in the lexicon and the phonological phrase in the utterance. We propose that the likeness of the tone patterns observed on phonological words and phonological phrases is due to the similarity of the processes of tone pattern derivation operating at both levels: these processes involve either (i) two elements, of which each has its own tone pattern, or (ii) two elements, of which one is specified for tone and the other is toneless. Overall, two rules apply in determining the resulting tone pattern for a unit of two syllables or more. Rule 1: The tone pattern of the first element decides the tone pattern of the resulting combination. Rule 2: /L/ and /HL/ neutralize to /L/. We discuss the exact application of these rules on the basis of combinations of tonally specified and toneless elements, bringing out additional regularities of the system. We also set out hypotheses concerning the prototypical domain for tone rule application in Shǐxīng, as well as the domain above it– that of stress-related phenomena. The article is concluded by a summary of the organization of the tonal system of Shǐxīng– including a re-analysis of /HL/ as accent. Two appendices provide (i) information about the language materials and experimental setup, and (ii) one transcribed traditional Shǐxīng story so as to facilitate the reader's evaluation of the proposed analysis.

Mots clés: Shixing; Tibeto-Burman; tone system; tone pattern derivation; stress

Domaines: Linguistique

Ekaterina Chirkova, Alexis Michaud. Approaching the prosodic system of Shǐxīng. 2008. ⟨hal-00336149v1⟩