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The focus prosody of Chichewa and the Stress-Focus constraint: a response to Samek-Lodovici (2005)

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Abstract

Samek-Lodovici (2005) contributes to a well-established tradition of work on the prosody-focus interface, which proposes that, cross-linguistically, there is a correlation between culminative prosodic prominence and focus. Chichewa focus prosody is problematic for the Stress-Focus correlation, because words with in-situ focus do not bear sentential stress, according to Kanerva’s (1990) description. To account for Chichewa, Samek-Lodovici proposes that, in essence, Chichewa does not have culminative focus prosody because it does not have culminative sentential prosody. Kanerva (1990:139–140) suggests that Chichewa does, though, have sentence-level stress: the penult of the final word of the Intonation Phrase (IP) is described as having ‘considerable lengthening’ making it ‘noticeably longer’ than any IP-internal stressed syllable whether focused or not. However, he does not provide phonetic figures to support this description. Surprisingly, no thorough follow-up phonetic study of Chichewa has systematically investigated this issue. In this paper we present the results of an experiment conducted in Malawi involving several non-linguist native speakers of Chichewa, which set out to test Kanerva’s (1990) and Samek-Lodovici’s (2005) conflicting claims about the relative length of penult vowels in focused vs. IP-final position. We show that Kanerva’s claim is correct: the penult vowel of an IP is significantly longer than other penult vowels in the IP, including those of words in focus. However, our study contradicts Kanerva (1990), as we find that focused constituents do not attract even phrasal stress. We suggest that the focus prosody reported is actually emphasis prosody, and that there is no obligatory focus prosody in Chichewa.

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Notes

  1. Samek-Lodovici (2005) formalizes in OT terms a long-standing proposal that the syntactic derivation of the position of focused elements in many languages has the effect of satisfying the Stress-Focus correlation. See work like Elordieta 2007a, 2007b; Engdahl and Vallduví 1996; Face and D’Imperio 2005; Szendroï 2003; Vallduví 1991; Vallduví and Engdahl 1996; and Zubizaretta 1998 for further discussion.

  2. The following abbreviations are used in the morpheme glosses: numbers indicate noun agreement class; obj=object marker; sbj=subject marker; tam=tense-aspect marker; perf=perfective; loc=locative.

  3. As mentioned above, Downing et al.’s (2004) study, like that of Kanerva (1990), analyzes data elicited from one native speaker. The speakers in these two studies represent different tonal dialects of Chichewa: Nkhotakota in Kanerva (1990) and Ntcheu in Downing et al. (2004).

  4. High tone plateauing, tone doubling, and avoidance of High tones on final vowels are common tonal processes cross-Bantu (Kisseberth and Odden 2003). See work like Hyman and Mtenje 1999; Moto 1989; Mtenje 1986, 1987; Myers 1996, 1998, 1999a, 1999b; Myers and Carleton 1996 for detailed analyses of tone in Chichewa, including some discussion of the dialectal variation in tone realization mentioned in this section.

  5. Kanerva (1990) actually argues that Intonation Phrases dominate Focus Phrases in Chichewa, not Phonological Phrases. Following Truckenbrodt (1995, 2005), we consider Focus Phrases in Chichewa focus-conditioned variants of Phonological Phrases, not a distinct level in the Prosodic Hierarchy.

  6. See work like Hayes 1995; Jun 2005; Selkirk 2004; and Truckenbrodt 1995 for detailed discussions of the correlates of stress and of the notion of culminative prominence.

  7. The attentive reader will note that the verbs in the subject questions in (13b) and (14b) do not have the same tone as in the other sentences in its set. This is because subject questions are reduced clefts, and the verb has the tone pattern found in relative clauses. See Mchombo 2004 and Downing and Mtenje 2011 for further discussion.

  8. We would like to thank Paul Boersma for his help in setting up Praat to present the question-answer pairs in random order, allowing for self-pacing, in the experiment.

  9. For some subjects and conditions there were only nine correct repetitions available.

  10. The grammatical subjects (pword 1) with lengthened penults show tonal retraction, providing additional evidence that they are Phonological Phrase-final. They are not likely IP-final, however, as we do not find any effect of phrase-final vowel lengthening or final boundary tone on lengthened subjects like we do on words in sentence-final position. More research is certainly needed, however, on the levels of prosodic phrasing in Chichewa and prosodic cues to each level.

  11. An ANOVA and post hoc Scheffé test showed the following results for final vowel length: pword F(3,1079)=38.738, p<.001 with 4>∗3>2=1 (p<.001, ∗ p<.05), i.e., the difference between 4>3 is only significant at the 5 % level.

    See Carleton (1996) and Kanerva (1990) for detailed arguments that the two final syllables of a prosodic phrase constitute a metrical foot in Chichewa. And see van Zanten (2011) for discussion of the accent-like properties of IP-penult syllables in Chichewa.

  12. An ANOVA and post hoc Scheffé test showed the following results for final vowel length: pword F(3,1087)=65.793, p<.001 with 4>3>2=1 (p<.001).

  13. See Ladd (2008) and Myers (2000) for detailed motivation of the gradient vs. categorical distinction as the principal criterion for classifying processes as either phonetic (gradient) or phonological (categorical).

  14. The focus-related phrasing in (10c) has parallels in other languages. In Bengali (Hayes and Lahiri 1991) and Northern Kyungsang Korean (Kenstowicz and Sohn 1997), a focused constituent can be set off by a Phonological Phrase break; and in English Selkirk (2000) and Vogel and Hoskins (1996) report that a sentence-final focused element can variably be set off as an independent Phonological Phrase. As Kager and Zonneveld (1999:27) note, “constituents tend to behave as prosodic islands under emphasis.”

  15. Bolding highlights the significantly raised f0-values (in Hz; and their sd in parentheses) of the pwords under focus (underlined) as revealed by Scheffé post hoc tests for an Anova over pitch maxima split by pword (∗∗: p<.01; ∗: p<.05). Bold cell borders indicate prosodic phrasing. The duration in ms of pauses is given in column ‘p:’; the ‘N’ column indicates the number of repetitions out of five containing a pause at that position. The interruption of the pitch contour of the fourth repetition in the lowest panel in (22), (8d), is caused by low volume level and not by a pause.

  16. Recall from (16), above, that none of the subjects in our study showed evidence of penult lengthening on focused indirect objects in sentences with all Low tones.

  17. As we can see in (23c), there is no phrase break before tambala ‘rooster’, even though it has contrastive focus and should be preceded by a phrase break to match data like (10b). This provides another example of the variability we find in the prosody of rephrasing, which shows it is more properly conditioned by emphasis rather than focus.

  18. That emphasis prosody might be involved in the phrasing documented in previous studies of Chichewa was originally suggested to us by the Chichewa linguists who helped prepare the elicitation materials for the experiment reported on in Sect. 3. It turned out to be quite difficult for our colleagues to decide on questions that might elicit rephrasing motivated by verb focus. (The attentive reader will have noticed that the questions used to elicit verb focus are alternative questions, not constituent questions.) They both insisted that this was because it would not be very common to have a phrase break following a verb. It was pointed out that such phrasings are documented in the Chichewa literature, and we asked if they could propose a translation or offer a likely context for a phrase break following the verb. In response, they offered as a translation of (9d), for example, “They really HIT the house with a rock.” Here a phrase break is possible because “you can emphasize anything” with rephrasing. We would like to thank our colleagues for bringing to our attention the possibility that rephrasing might be more closely connected with emphasis than focus—though we must admit that we did not appreciate the importance of this observation until after we had analyzed the results of the experiment.

  19. We would like to thank one of the reviewers for formulating this point so clearly.

  20. Following others who implement this typology, we are idealizing somewhat by setting aside focus-marking structures like clefts or pseudo-clefts, which English and other languages classified [−plastic syntax] have.

  21. Elordieta’s (2007a:216) Highlight constraint is the equivalent of Stress-Focus, while Information Focus is the equivalent of Sentence-Stress. We have replaced his terms in the discussion above for ease of comparison with Samek-Lodovici’s (2005) approach. Of course additional prosodic constraints are needed to formalize accent realization in NBB. The interested reader is referred to Elordieta (2007a, 2007b) and Hualde et al. (2002) for detailed discussion of the complexities of focus prosody in NBB.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank, first of all, the students who participated in the experiment reported on in this paper. We also are grateful to the following people involved in the experiment: Al Mtenje and Peter Kishindo for help in preparing the Chichewa materials, choosing students and supervising the recordings; Ellen van Zanten for help in preparing materials and carrying out the recordings; Paul Boersma for technical assistance in setting up the presentation of the material to record on Praat. We thank the Centre for Language Studies, Zomba, Malawi, for their hospitality during research visits to Malawi. This work was supported (in part) by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) (Grant Nr. 01UG0711) and an ANR/DFG French-German cooperation grant (BantuPsyn). We are grateful to the audiences of CALL 40, TIE4, the PJ workshop, and OCP8 for discussion, in particular Yiya Chen, Gorka Elordieta, Carlos Gussenhoven, Larry Hyman, Frank Kügler, Michael Rochemont and Lisa Selkirk. Finally, we would like to thank Michael Kenstowicz and the anonymous reviewers for detailed comments, which improved both the content and presentation of the paper. The usual disclaimers apply.

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  1. SPL, Göteborgs Universitet, Box 200, 405 30, Göteborg, Sweden

    Laura J. Downing

  2. Institut für Deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Under den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Germany

    Bernd Pompino-Marschall

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  1. Laura J. Downing
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  2. Bernd Pompino-Marschall
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Correspondence to Laura J. Downing.

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Downing, L.J., Pompino-Marschall, B. The focus prosody of Chichewa and the Stress-Focus constraint: a response to Samek-Lodovici (2005). Nat Lang Linguist Theory 31, 647–681 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-013-9192-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-013-9192-x

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