ON THE LINGUISTIC REPRESENTATION OF TONE.
Item
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Title
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ON THE LINGUISTIC REPRESENTATION OF TONE.
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Identifier
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AAI8501118
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identifier
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8501118
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Creator
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CAMHI, PAUL JACK.
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Contributor
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Robert Vago
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Date
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1984
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Linguistics
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Abstract
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The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the linguistic representation of tone within the standard theory of generative phonology (Chomsky & Hall, 1968) and also within the autosegmental theory of tone (Goldsmith, 1976); and to propose a set of non-trivial revisions to the theory which it is argued, will result in a more descriptively adequate analysis of tonological data.;Specifically, it is argued that the universal claims of autosegmental theory's Well-formedness Condition (WFC) and Convention on Tone Melodies (CTM), both of which explicate the formal principles by which tones are associated with vowels, are not universally supported by the data; and that the language-particular claims of the Major Association Procedures (MAP), which explicate the formal principles by which tones are associated with vowels, do not operate consistently in the languages inspected. By formally imposing the constraint on the WFC that all tones are associated with one and only one syllable rather than maintain the earlier claim that all tones are associated with at least one syllable, the Revised theory, proposed in this thesis, succeeds in formally prohibiting the CTM from operating and also replaces the excessively "complicated" MAP with a lexical specification process. The lexical specification process is preferred since it is intrinsically predicted by the operation of the proposed Condition on the Well-formedness of Lexical Representations, which states that a lexical representation is well-formed if and only if its structural description satisfies the structural requirements necessary for the operation of the Revised WFC. Therefore, the lexical specification process, unlike the lexical association process, constitutes a redundancy procedure, which is not ad hoc, and which does not constitute a formal complication to the theory.;A preliminary formal investigation into a syllable-based model for tonological organization is also explicated in this thesis. It is proposed that such a model which logically employs both hierarchical- and co-constituent analyses of phono/tonological organization results in a more unified analysis of tonological data.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Linguistics
