Prosodic Differences Between Declaratives and Polar Questions In Fataluku

PACLIC 28 !395 Prosodic Differences Between Declaratives and Polar Questions in Fataluku Tyler M. Heston Department of Linguistics University of Hawai‘i at M¯anoa Honolulu, Hawai‘i theston@hawaii.edu Abstract The primary goal of the present study is to de- scribe the basic prosodic differences between declaratives and polar questions in Fataluku, an underdocumented Papuan language spoken in the island nation of East Timor. Two robust prosodic differences between statements and questions are observed, namely, the duration of the final vowel and the intonational tune at the right margin of the sentence. Declara- tives have a shorter final vowel that carries a low f0, while questions have a much longer final vowel that has a rising-falling f0 pat- tern. I postulate a L% boundary tone for declaratives and a L+HL% boundary tone for questions, proposing that the final syllables of questions are lengthened to accommodate the more complex sequence of final tones. 1 Introduction Fataluku is an underdocumented language spo- ken by approximately 37,000 individuals in island Southeast Asia, on the far eastern tip of the nation of East Timor (Lewis et al., 2013). Fataluku is a mem- ber of the Timor-Alor-Pantar family of Papuan lan- guages, which includes about twenty-five languages spoken on Timor and nearby islands (Klamer, 2014; Schapper et al., 2014). Relatively little has been published about any aspect of the phonology of Fa- taluku. The primary goal of the present paper is to de- scribe the intonational differences between declar- atives and polar questions (also known as yes-no questions) in Fataluku. This paper is part of a larger project to describe Fataluku segmental and suprasegmental phonology. I analyze Fataluku into- nation within the framework of the autosegmental- metrical (AM) theory of intonational phonology (Pierrehumbert, 1980; Ladd, 1996), which has be- come the standard for intonation research. In the AM model, the phonological structure of intonation is represented underlyingly as a sequence of dis- crete level tones, each of which is associated either with a prominent syllable (a “pitch accent”) or with the edge of some prosodic constituent (a “boundary tone”). The surface intonation contour is a result of continuous interpolation between discrete level tones. My focus here is on behavior at the right edge of an Intonational Phrase (IP) in Fataluku. The IP—the largest prosodic constituent in the AM framework— is a phrase that can stand alone and is generally ac- companied by a final boundary tone and final length- ening (Jun and Fletcher, 2014). Typologically, IP- final boundary tones are rich sources of linguistic information (Lindstr¨om and Remijsen, 2005), a gen- eralization that holds for Fataluku as well. To lay the groundwork for the analysis of into- nation, section 2 provides some background on the language, including a review of a previous study on Fataluku question intonation. After a brief dis- cussion of methods, the results of the present study are given, describing the prosodic patterns of state- ments and polar questions. The discussion section proposes a phonological analysis to explain the ob- served prosodic differences. The paper …

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