Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (7)
- Postprint (3)
- Doctoral Thesis (2)
- Monograph/Edited Volume (1)
- Part of a Book (1)
Language
- English (14)
Keywords
- Akan (14) (remove)
Institute
This dissertation is about factors that contribute to the surface forms of tones in connected speech in Akan. Akan is an African tone language, which is spoken in Ghana. It has two level tones (low and high), automatic and non-automatic downstep. Downstep is the major factor that influences the surface forms of tones. The thesis shows that downstep is caused by declination. It is argued that declination is an intonational property of Akan, which serves to signal coherence. A phonological representation using a high and a low register tone, associating to the left and right edge of an intonational phrase (IP), respectively, is proposed. Declination/downstep is modelled using a (phonetic) pitch implementation algorithm (Liberman & Pierrehumbert, 1984). An innovative application of the algorithm is presented, which naturally captures the relation between declination and downstep in Akan. Another important factor is the prosodic manifestation of sentence level pragmatic meanings, such as sentence mode and focus. Regarding the former, the thesis shows that a post-lexical low tone, which associates with the right edge of an IP, signals interrogativity. Additionally, lexical tones in Yes – No questions are realized in a higher pitch register, which does not lead to a reduction of declination. It is claimed that the higher register is not part of the phonological representation in Akan, but that it emerges at the phonetic level to compensate for the ‘unnatural’ form of the question morpheme and to satisfy the Frequency code (Gussenhoven, 2002; 2004). An extension of Rialland’s (2007) typology in terms of a new category called “low tense” question prosody is proposed. Concerning focus marking, it is argued that the use of the morpho-syntactic focus marking strategy is related to extra grammatical factors, such as hearer expectation, discourse expectability (Zimmermann, 2007) and emphasis (Hartmann, 2008). If a speaker of Akan wants to highlight a particular element in a sentence, in-situ, i.e. by means of prosody, the default prosodic structure is modified in such a way that the focused element forms its own phonological phrase (pP). If it is already contained in a pP, the boundary deliminating the focused element is enhanced (Féry, 2012). This restructuring/enhancement is accompanied by an interruption of the otherwise continuous melody due to insertion of a pause and/or a glottal stop. Beside declination and intonation, raising of H tones applies in Akan. H raising is analyzed as a local anticipatory planning effect, employed at the phonetic level, which enhances the perceptual distance between low and high tones. Low tones are raised, if they are wedged between two high tones. L raising is argued to be a local carryover effect (co-articulation). Further, it is demonstrated that global anticipatory raising takes place. It is shown that Akan speakers anticipate the length of an IP. Preplanning (anticipatory raising) is argued to be an important process at the level of pitch implementation. It serves to ensure that declination can be maintained throughout the IP, which prevents pitch resetting.
The melody of an Akan sentence is largely determined by the choice of words. The inventory of post-lexical tones is small. It consists of post-lexical register tones, which trigger declination and post-lexical intonational tones, which signal sentence type. The overall melodic shape is falling. At the local level, H raising and L raising occur. At the global level, initial low and high tones are realized higher if they occur in a long and/or complex sentence. This dissertation shows that many factors, which emerge at different levels of the tone production process, contribute to the surface form of tones in Akan.
nà-cleft (non-)exhaustivity
(2021)
This paper presents two experimental studies on the exhaustive inference associated with focus-background na-clefts in Akan (among others, Boadi 1974; Duah 2015; Grubic & Renans & Duah 2019; Titov 2019), with a direct comparison to two recent experiments on German es-clefts employing an identical design (De Veaugh-Geiss et al. 2018). Despite the unforeseen response patterns in Akan in the incremental information-retrieval paradigm used, a post-hoc exploratory analysis reveals compelling parallels between the two languages. The results are compatible with a unified approach both (i) cross-linguistically between Akan and German; and (ii) cross-sententially between na-clefts (a na P, 'It is a who did P') and definite pseudoclefts, i.e., definite descriptions with identity statements (Nipa no a P ne a, 'The person who did P is a') (Boadi 1974; Ofori 2011). Participant variability in (non-)exhaustive interpretations is compatible with discourse pragmatic approaches to cleft exhaustivity (Pollard & Yasavul 2016; De Veaugh-Geiss et al. 2018; Titov 2019).
Cleft exhaustivity
(2020)
In this dissertation a series of experimental studies are presented which demonstrate that the exhaustive inference of focus-background it-clefts in English and their cross-linguistic counterparts in Akan, French, and German is neither robust nor systematic. The inter-speaker and cross-linguistic variability is accounted for with a discourse-pragmatic approach to cleft exhaustivity, in which -- following Pollard & Yasavul 2016 -- the exhaustive inference is derived from an interaction with another layer of meaning, namely, the existence presupposition encoded in clefts.
This paper reopens the discussion on focus marking in Akan (Kwa,
Niger-Congo) by examining the semantics of the so-called focus marker
in the language. It is shown that the so-called focus marker expresses
exhaustivity when it occurs in a sentence with narrow focus. The study
employs four standard tests for exhaustivity proposed in the literature
to examine the semantics of Akan focus constructions (Szabolsci 1981,
1994; É. Kiss 1998; Hartmann and Zimmermann 2007). It is shown that
although a focused entity with the so-called focus marker nà is
interpreted to mean ‘only X and nothing/nobody else,’ this meaning
appears to be pragmatic.