Re: Accent Terminology Question

Responding to Dirk and Jeff:

This is what happens when you try to apply imperfect knowledge to a 
situation.   :(   Sorry.

<<FR  42-24   42-24-24   42-24-24-24>>

Wow!   That's amazing!   I'd really like to hear that!

<<John Goldsmith proposed a default left-to-right spreading rule in his
1976 dissertation (he called it the Universal Association
Convention).>>

And by "right to left", I of course meant "left to right".   ;)   Not really. 
  I was confusing it with something else that I learned roughly at the same 
time in the same class--namely, reduplicatory prefixes and infixing prefixes. 
  I think they also attempted to describe the Arabic triconsonantal system 
with right to left spreading (as far as consonant roles, and the gemination 
that occurs in certain forms, e.g., the causative).

<<though the
patterns of tune-text association in Gregorian Chant (which otherwise
behaves like a tone language) are right-to-left.>>

Bah!?   How can I learn more about this?

<<Not all languages
tolerate contour tones>>

Another "oops".   When I said that languages do this "generally", I meant 
that languages with contour tones can do that.   ~:D

<<The idea of underlying tone is similar to the idea of any underlying
feature.>>

To illustrate, if, for example, you have a language with a high tone, a low 
tone, a rising tone, and a falling tone, and you have a string of affixes 
that usually have no tone associated with them...   (I'll continue with my 1, 
2 system, since there are only two levels.)

/ke(1)te(1)/ = "to eat"

/-ma()/ = "I" (subject) (the () means there's no tone)

/-le(*2)/ = "it" (object) (that * is to indicate that the tone is underlying)

So, if you want to build these into the word "I eat it", where the first 
suffix is the subject suffix, and the second subject is the object suffix, 
you'd get...

/ke(1)te(1) + ma() + le(*2)/

Which would end up as...

/ke(1)te(1)ma(1)le(21)/

With this output, you can posit that the affix /-le/ has an underlying high 
tone, which causes the blip.   Did I get that right?

-David

"imDeziZejDekp2wilDez ZejDekkinel..."
"You can celebrate anything you want..."
               -John Lennon

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