Revisiting Tones in Twic East Dinka

31st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 31), pages 400–406 Cebu City, Philippines, November 16-18, 2017 Copyright c⃝2017 Yu-Leng Lin Revisiting Tones in Twic East Dinka Yu-Leng Lin Hong Kong Polytechnic University / Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, Hung Hom, Hong Kong Abstract This work is based on data elicited from a native speaker of the Twic East variety of Dinka. It focuses on tones, and shows that tones in Dinka can alter syntactic categories and word meaning, mark direct objects, indicate whether objects are viewable/present and distinguish plurality. 1. Introduction This paper investigates tones in Twic East Dinka (a variety of Dinka), a Western Nilotic language spoken in South Sudan. Some literature reports that Luanyjang (Remijsen and Ladd 2008), Nyarweng (Remijsen 2010) Dinka have four contrastive tones and that Agar Dinka has three (Andersen 1992- 1994). I am not aware of any literature touching on the tonal system of Twic East Dinka or the interface between tone and other phonological phenomena, morphology, syntax and semantics, except for one study on Twic East Dinka syntax (Yuan 2013). Three research questions have motivated this study: (1) how many surface contrastive tones does Twic East Dinka have; (2) What functions do tones have in phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics and (3) What are the contexts of tone sandhi in Twic East Dinka? In general, tone is unlike accent and intonation. Tone can distinguish words lexically or grammatically, and tonal information is present as part of lexical representation. Accent can distinguish words, and typically two components, ‘tone’ and ‘no tone’, form a lexical contrast. For instance, in certain languages, H tone (accented) is active in phonological systems, and L (unaccented and treated as ‘no tone’) is supplied to the rest of toneless syllables or vice versa. Intonation cannot distinguish words lexically or grammatically, but it can be used in phrasal level. For instance, it can express emphasis or make a distinction between interrogative sentences (i.e., yes-no questions) and declarative sentences (see more discussion about tone, intonation and accent in Inkelas and Zec 1988, and Yip, 2002). The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents background information about the language consultant. Section 3 shows five contrastive tone groups with corresponding vocabulary and pitch values for each tone group. Section 4 introduces the five functions of tones in Twic East Dinka phonology, morphology, syntax or semantics. Section 5 explores the contexts of tone sandhi. Section 6 concludes this paper. 400 2. Language consultant The language consultant was born and raised in Southern Sudan, speaking the Twic East dialect of Dinka. He came to Canada to obtain his bachelor’s degree at the University of Toronto. He was 21 years old, a fourth-year undergraduate student, when the elicitation sessions were conducted September-December, 2011. 3. Five Surface Contrastive Tones In Twic East Dinka, the writing system does not encode tones as tonal languages like Mandarin do. With this concern, careful elicitation is necessary in order to investigate the exact number of tone values …

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