Tone and Stress in Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara) Word Prosody

Abstract

This paper presents the word-prosodic system of Choguita Rarámuri, a Uto-Aztecan language that displays both stress-accent and tone with complex morphological conditioning. While closely related languages have been documented to possess culminative word prominence involving both stress and contrastive tone (Demers, Escalante, and Jelinek 1999 and Hagberg 1989), no variety of Rarámuri had been described as featuring lexical tone. On the basis of phonological evidence and a detailed acoustic investigation, we propose that (i) stress-accent and tone are phonologically distinct systems in Choguita Rarámuri; (ii) stress-accent and tone are independent in terms of their acoustic encoding; (iii) both stress-accent and tone are governed in their distribution and makeup by lexical and morphological conditions; (iv) the tone system features a three-way contrast between HL, L, and M; and (v) lexical tonal contrasts are exclusively realized in stressed syllables—that is, tonal distribution is dependent on stress-accent.

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