Christian DiCanio of the University of Buffalo will present a colloquium entitled “Is intonation universal?” on Friday Nov. 30th at 3:30 pm in ILC N400 (abstract below). The talk will be followed by a reception. All are welcome!

Abstract. Languages with large lexical tone inventories represent a unique challenge to studies of intonation and prosody. Such languages typically involve less freedom for suprasegmental properties of speech to be manipulated for indicating either pragmatic meaning or phrasal constituency (Connell 2017). Might it be possible for a complex tonal language to lack intonation altogether? In this talk, I report on two phonetic studies carried out in the field examining how the nine complex tones of Itunyoso Triqui (Otomanguean: Mexico) are affected by information structure (broad focus, narrow focus, contrastive focus) and utterance boundaries. Though prosodic lengthening occurs, tones are surprisingly consistent across these contexts, maintaining both their shape and height. These findings are examined in relation to an emerging typology of the tone-intonational interface and in comparison with a set of parallel experiments carried out on a related language with a complex tonal system (Yoloxóchitl Mixtec, c.f. DiCanio et al 2018). What seems to distinguish tonal languages with strong intonational effects from those with weak effects is the degree to which prosodic and pragmatic distinctions have been grammaticalized as non-suprasegmental processes, a fertile topic at the interface of linguistic fieldwork, phonetics, and phonology