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This paper investigates the intonation system of Paraguayan Guarani in the Autosegmental-metrical (AM) framework of intonational phonology. Previous work on Guarani intonation stated that Guarani has two types of pitch accent, rising (L*+H or LH) and falling (H+L* or HL), and there is no prosodic unit between a word and an Intonational Phrase. But these findings seem to have resulted from the limitation of the data examined. When longer words/sentences and various syntactic structures are examined, it was found that Guarani has one type of pitch accent, a tri-tonal HLH*, and has an Accentual Phrase (AP). The tonal pattern of AP is /H HLH* Ha/, i.e., it has one pitch accent and its edges are marked by a H tone. However, because the pitch accent is tri-tonal, AP edge tones are realized only when an AP is longer than four syllables and stress is not final, suggesting that the function of AP boundary tone is not marking word prominence as in other AP languages. Instead, an important function of Guarani AP seems to mark specific syntactic categories and groupings. These findings are compared with other AP languages and discussed in terms of the typology of word-prominence type. Index Terms: intonation, Paraguayan Guarani, tri-tonal pitch accent, Accentual Phrase, prosodic typology
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This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2026
The timing of speech and gesture in two Niger-Congo languages: Implications for word-level prominence
Co-speech gestures are timed to occur with prosodically prominent syllables in several languages. In prior work in Indo-European languages, gestures are found to be attracted to stressed syllables, with gesture apexes preferentially aligning with syllables bearing higher and more dynamic pitch accents. Little research has examined the temporal alignment of co-speech gestures in African tonal languages, where metrical prominence is often hard to identify due to a lack of canonical stress correlates, and where a key function of pitch is in distinguishing between words, rather than marking intonational prominence. Here, we examine the alignment of co-speech gestures in two different Niger-Congo languages with very different word structures, Medʉmba (Grassfields Bantu, Cameroon) and Igbo (Igboid, Nigeria). Our findings suggest that the initial position in the stem tends to attract gestures in Medʉmba, while the final syllable in the word is the default position for gesture alignment in Igbo; phrase position also influences gesture alignment, but in language-specific ways. Though neither language showed strong evidence of elevated prominence of any individual tone value, gesture patterning in Igbo suggests that metrical structure at the level of the tonal foot is relevant to the speech-gesture relationship. Our results demonstrate how the speech-gesture relationship can be a window into patterns of word- and phrase-level prosody cross-linguistically. They also show that the relationship between gesture and tone (and the related notion of ‘tonal prominence’) is mediated by tone’s function in a language.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2306149
- PAR ID:
- 10644458
- Publisher / Repository:
- Open Library of Humanities
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Glossa: a journal of general linguistics
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2397-1835
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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This paper investigates the intonation system of Paraguayan Guarani in the Autosegmental-metrical (AM) framework of intonational phonology. Previous work on Guarani intonation stated that Guarani has two types of pitch accent, rising (L*+H or LH) and falling (H+L* or HL), and there is no prosodic unit between a word and an Intonational Phrase. But these findings seem to have resulted from the limitation of the data examined. When longer words/sentences and various syntactic structures are examined, it was found that Guarani has one type of pitch accent, a tri-tonal HLH*, and has an Accentual Phrase (AP). The tonal pattern of AP is /H HLH* Ha/, i.e., it has one pitch accent and its edges are marked by a H tone. However, because the pitch accent is tri-tonal, AP edge tones are realized only when an AP is longer than four syllables and stress is not final, suggesting that the function of AP boundary tone is not marking word prominence as in other AP languages. Instead, an important function of Guarani AP seems to mark specific syntactic categories and groupings. These findings are compared with other AP languages and discussed in terms of the typology of word-prominence type. Index Terms: intonation, Paraguayan Guarani, tri-tonal pitch accent, Accentual Phrase, prosodic typologymore » « less
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This paper investigates the intonation system of Paraguayan Guarani in the Autosegmental-metrical (AM) framework of intonational phonology. Previous work on Guarani intonation stated that Guarani has two types of pitch accent, rising (L*+H or LH) and falling (H+L* or HL), and there is no prosodic unit between a word and an Intonational Phrase. But these findings seem to have resulted from the limitation of the data examined. When longer words/sentences and various syntactic structures are examined, it was found that Guarani has one type of pitch accent, a tri-tonal HLH*, and has an Accentual Phrase (AP). The tonal pattern of AP is /H HLH* Ha/, i.e., it has one pitch accent and its edges are marked by a H tone. However, because the pitch accent is tri-tonal, AP edge tones are realized only when an AP is longer than four syllables and stress is not final, suggesting that the function of AP boundary tone is not marking word prominence as in other AP languages. Instead, an important function of Guarani AP seems to mark specific syntactic categories and groupings. These findings are compared with other AP languages and discussed in terms of the typology of word-prominence type.more » « less
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