Title:
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An autosegmental approach to Amharic intonation
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The central purpose of this thesis is to present a
detailed account of the intonation of Amharic. The model
adopted for this is that of the Autosegmental Phonology and
in particular deriving- considerable inspiration from the
work of Pierrehumbert (1980). In the description, intonational
features are represented as well ordered sequences of
static tones on a separate tier from the segments. The segmental
and the autosegmental tiers are associated following
principles given by the Universal Association Convention and
the language particular rules.
To spell out the association principles, the lexical
category and the word-group (or phrase) stress rules have
been investigated. The former predicts the lexically stressable
syllable within the category stem. The stressable
syllable is the only one that may be associated with the
pitch accent, (i. e., the stress-related melody). The phrase
accent is usually associated with the last syllable of the
penultimate word or follows the last pitch accent within the
intonational phrase.
A number of contour type: meaning correlates are identified
for Amharic and they are analysed to reveal certain
'basic features. Each of these basic features is shown to be
capable of modification by varying the value(s) of the constituent
tones.
There are some intonational features in Amharic which
do not have counterparts in English. The quotative contour
provides an example and it requires a device not fully
available in a model devised particularly to handle the features
of English. Associating two starred tones, i. e. pitch
accents with a single tone-bearing-unit, and allowing
bitonal boundary tones are among the modifications on tonal
representations which are proposed in this thesis
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