Hostname: page-component-6b88cc9666-gpjr2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-02-12T15:48:09.576Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cumulativity and ganging in the tonology of Awa suffixes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Laura McPherson
Laura McPherson*
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College
*
[laura.e.mcpherson@dartmouth.edu]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article revives old descriptive data on Awa, a Papuan language of the Kainantu group. The tonal system was described in detail in a paper by Loving (1973), where he reports a series of toneless noun suffixes, falling into six classes depending on their tonal alternations when combined with a noun root. This article demonstrates that the suffixes are best understood as carrying lexical tone; the alternations in form arise from the interaction of typologically natural tonotactic constraints. While the system can be described in autosegmental terms without much difficulty, a formal constraint-based analysis is less straightforward. I show that strict ranking, as in optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004 [1993]), fails to capture the data patterns due to cumulativity effects, some of which cannot be naturally captured even with local constraint conjunction (Smolensky 2006). The data are successfully modeled in harmonic grammar (Legendre et al. 1990).

Keywords

tonePapua New Guineaharmonic grammarconstraint conjunctionganging

Information

Type
Phonological Analysis
Information
Language , Volume 92 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. e38 - e66
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Baković, Eric. 2000. Harmony, dominance, and control. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University dissertation.Google Scholar
Cahill, Michael. 2007. More universals of tone. SIL Electronic Working Papers. Online: http://www.sil.org/resources/publications/entry/7816.Google Scholar
Clements, George N., and Keyser, Samuel Jay. 1983. CV phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Green, Christopher, and Davis, Stuart. 2014. Superadditivity and limitations on syllable complexity in Bambara words. Perspectives on phonological theory and development, in honor of Daniel A. Dinnsen, ed. by Farris-Trimble, Ashley and Barlow, Jessica, 22347. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Harry, Otelemate G., and Hyman, Larry. 2014. Phrasal construction tonology: The case of Kalabari. Studies in Language 38. 649–89. DOI: 10.1075/sl.38.4.01hym.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayes, Bruce. 1990. Precompiled phrasal phonology. The phonology-syntax connection, ed. by Inkelas, Sharon and Zec, Draga, 85–108. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hyman, Larry. 2007a. Elicitation as experimental phonology: Thlantland Lai tonology. Experimental approaches to phonology, ed. by Solé, Maria-Josep, Beddor, Patrice Speeder, and Ohala, Manjari, 7–24. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hyman, Larry. 2007b. Universals of tone rules: 30 years later. Typological studies in word and sentence prosody, ed. by Riad, Tomas and Gussenhoven, Carlos, 1–34. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Hyman, Larry. 2010. Amazonia and the typology of tone systems. UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2010), 376–94. Online: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4qr2h33t.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hyman, Larry, and Schuh, Russell. 1974. Universals of tone rules: Evidence from West Africa. Linguistic Inquiry 5. 81–115. Online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4177809.Google Scholar
Inkelas, Sharon. 1998. The theoretical status of morphologically conditioned phonology: A case study of dominance effects. Yearbook of Morphology 1997. 121–55. DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-4998-3_5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Itô, Junko, and Mester, Armin. 1998. Markedness and word structure: OCP effects in Japanese. Santa Cruz: University of California, Santa Cruz, ms. Online: http://roa.rutgers.edu/article/view/265.Google Scholar
Itô, Junko, and Mester, Armin. 2003. Japanese morphophonemics: Markedness and word structure. (Linguistic Inquiry monograph 41.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jäger, Gerhard, and Rosenbach, Anette. 2006. The winner takes it all—almost: Cumulativity in grammatical variation. Linguistics 44. 937–71. DOI: 10.1515/LING.2006.031.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Legendre, Géraldine, Miyata, Yoshiro; and Smolensky, Paul. 1990. Harmonic grammar—a formal multi-level connectionist theory of linguistic well-formedness: Theoretical foundations. ICS technical report 90–5. Boulder: University of Colorado. Online: http://www.colorado.edu/ics/sites/default/files/attached-files/90-05.pdf.Google Scholar
Loving, Aretta, and Loving, Richard. 1975. Awa dictionary. Canberra: Australian National University.Google Scholar
Loving, Richard. 1973. Awa phonemes, tonemes and tonally differentiated allomorphs. In McKaughan, 10–18.Google Scholar
Łubowicz, Anna. 2005. Locality of conjunction. West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) 24. 254–62. Online: http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/24/paper1230.pdf.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John, and Prince, Alan. 1995. Faithfulness and reduplicative identity. University of Massachusetts occasional papers in linguistics, vol. 18: Papers in optimality theory, ed. by Beckman, Jill, Dickey, Laura Walsh, and Urbanczyk, Suzanne, 249–384. Amherst, mA: GLSA Publications.Google Scholar
McKaughan, Howard (ed.) 1973. The languages of the Eastern family of the East Highland New Guinea stock. Seattle: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
McKaughan, Howard, and Loving, Aretta. 1973. Possessive prefixes occurring with inalienable Awa nouns. In McKaughan, 31–35.Google Scholar
McPherson, Laura. 2014. Replacive grammatical tone in the Dogon languages. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles dissertation.Google Scholar
Moreton, Elliott, and Smolensky, Paul. 2002. Typological consequences of local constraint conjunction. West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) 21. 306–19.Google Scholar
Myers, Scott. 1997. OCP effects in optimality theory. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 15. 847–92. DOI: 10.1023/A:1005875608905.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe. 2016. Universal grammar with weighted constraints. Harmonic grammar and harmonic serialism, ed. by John McCarthy and Joe Pater. London: Equinox, to appear.Google Scholar
Potts, Christopher, Pater, Joe, Jesney, Karen, Bhatt, Rajesh; and Becker, Michael. 2010. Harmonic grammar with linear programming: From linear systems to linguistic typology. Phonology 27. 77–117. DOI: 10.1017/S0952675710000047.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prince, Alan, and Smolensky, Paul. 2004 [1993]. Optimality theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Shih, Stephanie. 2016. Super additive similarity in Dioula tone harmony. West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) 33. 361–70. Online: http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/33/index.html.Google Scholar
Smolensky, Paul. 1993. Harmony, markedness and phonological activity. Paper presented at the Rutgers Optimality Workshop 1, Rutgers University.Google Scholar
Smolensky, Paul. 2006. Optimality in phonology II: Harmonic completeness, local conjunction, and feature domain markedness. In Smolensky & Legendre, 27–160.Google Scholar
Smolensky, Paul, and Legendre, Géraldine. 2006. The harmonic mind, vol. 2: From neural computation to optimality-theoretic grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Staubs, Robert, Becker, Michael, Potts, Christopher, Pratt, Patrick, McCarthy, John J.; and Pater, Joe. 2010. OT-Help 2.0. Software package. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Amherst. Online: http://people.umass.edu/othelp/.Google Scholar
Welmers, William. 1973. African language structures. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Wolf, Matthew. 2007. For an autosegmental theory of mutation. University of Massachusetts occasional working papers in linguistics, vol. 32: Papers in optimality theory III, ed. by Bateman, Leah, O’Keefe, Michael, Reilly, Ehren, and Werle, Adam, 315–404. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications.Google Scholar
Yip, Moira. 2002. Tone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhang, Jie. 2004. Contour tone licensing and contour tone representation. Language and Linguistics 5. 925–68.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

McPherson supplementary material

McPherson supplementary material
Download McPherson supplementary material(File)
File 198.1 KB