Intonation: Theory, Models, and Applications Athens, Greece September 18-20, 1997

Intonational Structure of Lekeitio Basque

Sun-Ah Jun (1), Gorka Elordieta (2)

(1) UCLA, Dept. of Linguistics; (2) USC, Dept. of Linguistics, Los Angeles. CA, USA

The pitch accent in Lekeitio Basque (LB) is realized as H*L on the penult of an underlyingly accented word or on the final syllable of a derived accented word, (=underlyingly unaccented, but accented in a preverbal position). Elordieta claimed that LB has an Accentual Phrase (AP) demarcated by H*L; thus, unaccented words in non-preverbal position never form one AP. It has also been assumed that the peak of H*L is the same whether it is underlying or not. However, results of a phonetic experiment show that unaccented words can form one AP, thus eliminating the H* tone leftward spreading rule. Also, we found that the underlying pitch accent is significantly higher than the derived pitch accent. Finally, an Intonation Phrase final vowel is significantly lengthened while vowels at the end of AP or Intermediate Phrase are not.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Jun, Sun-Ah / Elordieta, Gorka (1997): "Intonational structure of lekeitio basque", In INT-1997, 193-196.