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The persistence of abstract pattern in phrasal prosody: How unbounded high tone spreading became a ‘crazy rule’ in San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino| title | The persistence of abstract pattern in phrasal prosody: How unbounded high tone spreading became a ‘crazy rule’ in San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino |
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| start_date | 2025/03/17 |
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| schedule | 15h-16h30 |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle Elise Rivet & en ligne |
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| details | Séminaire DiLiS |
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| summary | ‘Crazy rules’ (Bach & Harms 1972) are phonological alternations or patterns lacking in coherent synchronic phonetic motivation. They typically arise when more ‘natural’ rules change over time e.g., by broadening their phonetic scope, merging with other similar rules, or losing their original phonetic context (Blevins 2004:84-5); and they challenge the assumption that phonetic ‘naturalness’ is a necessary condition in the constitution or learning of phonological systems (Moreton & Pater 2012). Rather, they offer a lens through which to consider the extent to which phonological systems may or may not vary (e.g., Kiparsky 2014), as well as the nature, the genesis, and even the persistence over time of patterns that are atypical or unusual (Woodbury 2024).
Documentation and diachronic explanation for ‘crazy rules’ has typically focused on morphophonological alternations involving segments. Here we present a ‘crazy rule’ involving utterance-level tone spreading in the Chatino language family (Otomanguean; Oaxaca, Mexico; Campbell 2013), facilitated by our reconstruction of lexical, grammatical, and phrasal tone in this family well known for its elaboration of tone. We show how a conservative process of utterance-level high tone spreading (attested across the family and preserved in San Marcos Zacatepec Eastern Chatino, Villard 2015, which we describe) has innovated in San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino (Cruz 2011) into a ‘crazy rule’ where the class of five high- or superhigh-ending tonal cognate sets that originally triggered the high spreading in conservative varieties underwent tonal changes that left an ‘unnatural’ array of level, rising and falling tonemes as the trigger (and that likewise left the class of non-triggering, originally non-high, tonal cognate sets comparably heterodox). Further, the original unbounded high-tone spread itself turned into the iterative copying and linking of a falling (mid-to-low) toneme to each word up to the end of the utterance, interesting because it transforms the continuation of phonetic high pitch into the stepwise phonological propagation of a particular tonemic figure.
Finally and more speculatively, the process is of interest in its wider sociolinguistic context of apparently rapid village-by-village differentiation: San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino is one of about 10 highly distinct village-level Eastern Chatino varieties where originally multimoraic and multisyllabic wordforms became monosyllabic via non-final vowel loss, preserving the tone-based lexical and grammatical classes originally carried in tonal melodies (sequences of tonemes) by elaborating their toneme inventories in various ways (Woodbury 2019); but San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino is unique in having fashioned distinctiveness by preserving and transforming this (and several other) sandhi patterns from the protolanguage. |
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| responsibles | Coupé |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2025/03/12 13:35 UTC |
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