Cascadilla Proceedings Project: Paper 1306


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Selected Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference on African Linguistics: African Languages and Linguistics in Broad Perspectives
edited by John Mugane, John P. Hutchison, and Dee A. Worman

ISBN 1-57473-410-5 library binding
v + 283 pages
publication date: 2006
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA

Table of contents



Abstract

Claire K. Turner
Tone Fusion in Mòbà Yorùbá
158-168 (complete pdf)

Previous analyses of the effect of vowel elision on tone in Yoruba have been largely confined to the Standard dialect (Pulleyblank 1986, Akinlabi and Liberman 2001). The Moba dialect differs from the Standard in one tonal environment: where the two tones of the hiatus vowels are high and low sequentially, the non-elided vowel surfaces with a high tone in Standard Yoruba, and a mid tone in Moba Yoruba. This paper uses the concept of tone feature geometries (Bao 1999, Snider 1999) to provide an autosegmental analysis of elision in this tonal environment, suggesting that the mid tone resulting in the Moba dialect arises out of tonal fusion between the high and low tones of the elided and non-elided hiatus vowels.


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