Lexical and post-lexical tones in Akan

270 Pages·2015·2.7 MB·English

by  Genzel, Susanne

Lexical and post-lexical tones
in Akan

Dissertation
zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades
Doctor philosophiae
(Dr.phil.)
an der Humanwissenschaftlichen Fakultät
der Universität Potsdam

eingereicht von
Susanne Genzel

Februar 2013
Published online at the
Institutional Repository of the University of Potsdam:
URN urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-77969
http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-77969
In memory of my aunt, Sabine Genzel.

Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to express my very great appreciation to my supervisors, Caroline
Féry and Frank Kügler. I am especially grateful to Frank. He hired me as a student assistant in
summer 2003 and let me take part in many interesting empirical investigations. Later on, in
November 2007, he employed me in the project D5 on “Tonal structure and information
structure: Phonetics & Phonology”, which is part of the wonderful collaborative research
centre on information structure (SFB 632), financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
(DFG). Akan is one of the languages we are investigating in our project. Frank did a great job
as supervisor. He was very interested and encouraging and always had time for me to discuss
new ideas. Caroline was my Prof. in linguistics when I studied at University of Potsdam. Her
seminar “Intonation im typologischen Vergleich”, held in winter 2004/2005, impressed me
and made me curious for intonation/prosody and typology. Caroline’s comments were very
helpful and improved the thesis immensely. Discussing with her was really inspiring.
My special thanks are extended to all participants and informants. “Mo boaa me paa.
Medaase!” Especially, I would like to mention Afua Blay, Reginald Duah, Benjamin Bamfo
and Monica Apenten, who made me feel at home in Ghana and were always willing to share
their native speaker intuitions with me. Without you, I could not have written the thesis.
Further, I would like to thank Akua Appiah-Akuramaa who was my ‘Berlin’ informant.
Further, I am very grateful to Dr. K. Dovlo who very kindly welcomed me to the University
of Ghana (Legon), arranged my first talk in front of a native speaker audience and provided
me with everything I needed. I also wish to acknowledge the help provided by Prof. Dr. K.
Saah and Nana Ama Agyeman. Additionally, I would like to thank Dr. C. Marfo, working at
the University of Kumasi (KNUST), for discussing phrasing related and other Akan specific
issues with me and for drawing my attention to the conference of the Linguistics Association
of Ghana in Winneba (2012).
I have talked to many people during the thesis writing process. First of all, I would like to
mention Sabine Zerbian. Since she had her office very close to mine, I went there very often
to ask tone language related questions. She always had time for me and also read an early
version and provided very helpful comments. Further, I am grateful to Ruben van de Vijver
who also gave very useful advices and made me laugh. I would also like to mention Anja
Arnhold, Sandra Beyermann, Laura Downing, Ines Fiedler, Anja Gollrad, Markus Greif, Mira
Grubic, Robin Hörnig, Shinishiro Ishihara, Sara Myrberg, Annie Rialland, Bernadett
Smolibocki and Thomas Westkott….
i
Finally, I wish to thank my family, Mama, Oma, Onkelchen, Marie und Hannah for their
unconditional love and support. Further, I am grateful to all my friends for their patience, for
calling me, writing me, cooking for me, giving massages and providing plenty of other sorts
of support. Last but not least, I want to thank Himanshu, for keeping the household running,
for his irrepressible high spirits, patience, support and goodies.

ii
List of abbreviations and symbols
ATR advanced tongue root
BT breathy termination
C consonant
COMP1 complementizer
CP complementizer phrase
db decibel
DD downdrift
DEF definite
∆ difference/drop
DIM diminutive
DET determiner
DP determiner phrase
DS downstep
focus
F
F formant
F0 fundamental frequency
fin final
FM focus marker
h high register tone
H high tone
HAB habitual
Hz Hertz
IMP imperative
InflP inflectional phrase
Int intensity
Int relativeintensity
rel
IP/ι intonation phrase
l low register tone
L low tone
LPC linear predictive coding
M mid tone
max maximal
ms millisecond
μ mora
NEG negative
NOM nominal
NP nominal phrase
NSF non-subject focus
OPT optative
PL plural
pMCMC p-value calculated from MONTE CARLO sampling by Markov chain
pP/φ phonological phrase
PART particle
Φ foot
PoD position of the pitch drop
PRF perfective
PRO pronoun

1 The abbreviations in small capitals basically follow the convention of the Leipzig Glossing Rules (Bickel,
Comrie & Haspelmath, 2004).
iii
PROG progressive
P subglottal air pressure
sg
PST past
pw/ω prosodic word
r baseline value
R2 coefficient of determination
RTR retracted tongue root
σ syllable
s downdrift quotient
sec second
SF subject focus
SG singular
st semitone
SPEC specific
SVO subject, verb, object
T tone
T terminal
T* pitch accent
T! downstepped tone
T floating tone
T% boundary tone
TBU tone bearing unit
TM topic marker
TW target word
U utterance
V verb
V vowel
VP verbal phrase
x beat
X0 lexical word
XP maximal projection
♀ female
♂ male
 local lowering
 local raising
↑ global raising

iv
Contents
Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………....i
List of abbreviations and symbols…………………………………………………………… iii

About the book ........................................................................................................................... 1

1.  Chapter General and theoretical background ..................................................................... 7 
1.1  General introduction to Akan ...................................................................................... 8 
1.2  Phonological representation of tone .......................................................................... 12 
1.3  Tone terracing ............................................................................................................ 17 
1.4  Prosodic structure ...................................................................................................... 25 
1.4.1  The prosodic organization of constituents ......................................................... 25 
1.4.2  Prosodic constituents and their phonetic properties ........................................... 26 
1.5  Tonal and non-tonal intonation .................................................................................. 40 
1.5.1  What is intonation? ............................................................................................. 40 
1.5.2  Sentence type ...................................................................................................... 42 
1.5.3  Focus .................................................................................................................. 45 
1.6  Universal intonational meaning ................................................................................. 51 
1.6.1  The Production code ........................................................................................... 51 
1.6.2  The Frequency code ........................................................................................... 53 
1.6.3  The Effort code ................................................................................................... 54 
1.7  Phonetic implementation ........................................................................................... 55 
1.8  Tonal variations in connected speech ........................................................................ 58 
1.9  Summary of the main research questions .................................................................. 60

2.  Chapter Material and methods ......................................................................................... 62 
2.1  The participants ......................................................................................................... 62 
2.2  The corpus ................................................................................................................. 63 
2.3  Recording procedure .................................................................................................. 70 
2.4  Data pre-processing and statistical analysis .............................................................. 71

3.  Chapter The influence of adjacent tones in connected speech ......................................... 73 
3.1  L raising ..................................................................................................................... 73 
3.2  H raising .................................................................................................................... 81

4.  Chapter Downtrends ......................................................................................................... 92 
4.1  Types of downstep ..................................................................................................... 93 
4.2  Downstep in initial position ..................................................................................... 100 
4.3  Declination and downstep ....................................................................................... 107 
4.3.1  Declination ....................................................................................................... 107 
4.3.2  The implementation of declination .................................................................. 119 
4.3.3  Downstep .......................................................................................................... 124 
4.3.4  The implementation of downstep ..................................................................... 143

5.  Chapter Anticipatory raising, length and prosodic structure .......................................... 152 
5.1  Anticipatory raising and downstep .......................................................................... 153 
5.2  Anticipatory raising and phrase length .................................................................... 155

6.  Chapter The intonation of Yes – No questions .............................................................. 173
7.  Chapter The expression of focus .................................................................................... 201
7.1  Syntactic focus marking .......................................................................................... 201 
7.2  Prosodic focus marking ........................................................................................... 209

Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 223

Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 235

List of figures ......................................................................................................................... 251 
List of tables ........................................................................................................................... 258

Statement of Authorship/Selbstständigkeitserklärung ........................................................... 260