Lecture | LUCL Colloquium - Series '24/'25
Tonal reflexes of topic and focus in Heiban languages
- Date
- Thursday 13 March 2025
- Time
- Serie
- LUCL Colloquium - Series '24/'25
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.23
Abstract
In this talk, I examine how topic and focus constructions are marked tonally in two Heiban languages of Sudan, Tira and Rere, and how the tone that marks these constructions interacts with and behaves differently than other tones. In both languages, topic and focus elements are fronted, concomitant with a verb-second word order. Focus is also marked by a H tone at the left edge of the verb/auxiliary. In Rere, when a non-subject is fronted, an additional H tone is found at the right edge of the verb/auxiliary, an instance of non-subject voice. Both languages also have progressive H tone spreading. In Tira, H tone spreading occurs across words, but is blocked between the topic and the following verb, setting the topic apart prosodically. In Rere, unbounded H tone spreading is triggered by pre-verbal elements (subject proclitics, negation) across the verb complex. H tone spreading is not blocked by tense-aspect-mood-deixis grammatical H tone on the verb, but it is blocked by non-subject voice H tone and by H tone marking accusative case on pronominal enclitics, both tones that mark syntactic relationships. In these cases, binary spreading occurs instead, an instance of ‘sour grapes’ spreading. I will discuss how the behavior of the tones that mark syntactic constructions should be modeled without a reliance on cyclicity.