You have had an introduction to phonetics and phonology; learned about the different sounds that exist and how languages make use of them to convey meaning. This lesson, we keep working on sounds. However, we will look specifically at prosodic (suprasegmental) features.

Read & practice:

A.From our main textbook - Velupillai: An introduction to linguistic typology

Chapter 4 Phonology: if you haven't already read this part, read 4.2.3 "Patterns of prosody". This includes length, tone and stress.

Study questions for this section will follow here.

Remember: prosodical features are in large part dependent on the rise and fall of pitch. Pitch plays an important role in tone, stress and intonation. This often leads to different analyses by different authors as to whether a language is a tone or an accentual language. The main phonetic correlate of both kinds is the movement of pitch, and NOT amplitude, as written in Velupillai p.69

B. Downing, Laura J. and Morgan Nilsson. 2019. Prosodic restructuring in Somali nominals constructions. In Samson Lotven, Silvina Bongiovanni, Phillip Weirich, Robert Botne and Samuel Gyasi Obeng (eds): African Linguistics Across The Disciplines: Selected Papers From The 48th Annual Conference On African Linguistics 125-142. Berlin: Language Science Press Berlin.

With this publication, we go into details on the prosodic system of one language, in this case Somali. We will not delve deeper into the tricky continuum which is the distinction between tone and stress languages. Further reading if you are interested (NB not obligatory):

Hyman, Larry. 2006. Word-prosodic typology. Phonology 23:225-257.

Downing, Laura J. 2010. Accent in African languages. In Harry Van Der Hulst, Rob Goedemans and Ellen Van Zanten (eds): A Survey of Word Accentual Patterns in the Languages of the World. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton.

C. Phonology plays a role also on the morpheme level; there are for example different forms of affixes depending on the stem they attach to (allomorphs). These are morphophonological alternations. Read about this in section 11.2 and 11.3 in the following book:

Zsiga, Elizabeth C. 2012 or 2013. The Sounds of Language : An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology. Chicester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.

The linguistic question of this lesson relates to this topic.

Do the exercise (explained when you follow the link), and try to solve it together. Post your suggested solution, and ask questions, in this forum. NB this is obligatory. When you have written in the forum, you will get a 'complete' for this assignment. Meaning, your solution does not necessarily have to be right.