The interaction between metrical structure and tone in Kera

Abstract

This paper examines the cues for and interaction between the metrical and tonal systems of Kera. Kera has no word-level stress, but the heads of its quantity-sensitive iambic feet are cued by duration, intensity and vowel allophony; in addition, foot boundaries are identified by vowel-harmony and tone-spreading domains. The tonal system has three underlying tones, which are enhanced by differences in voice onset time (VOT). Kera demonstrates an interaction between the iambic foot and tone. Words have one or two tones. For words of three or more syllables the tone-bearing unit is the foot, but for shorter words it is the syllable. This dichotomy is accounted for by a faithfulness constraint requiring all tones to surface, which overrides a constraint limiting each foot to one tone. Kera shows that a tonal system can be sensitive to metrical structure, while maintaining a certain independence between the two systems.

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