Since Hymans seminal paper, Somali has usually been considered to be a tonal/pitch-accent language. Recently, phonologists have cast doubt upon the pertinence of such a prosodic class, arguing that pitch-accent languages do not form a coherent category with distinctive criteria and can be reduced to either stress/accent or tonal languages. This paper outlines a tonal analysis of Somali. It aims at showing that the multiple pitch patterns observed in different classes of words and syntactic contexts find a more accurate account within an approach using tonal features only.
DOI: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2016-60
Le Gac, D. (2016) Somali as a tone language. Proc. Speech Prosody 2016, 292-296.
@inproceedings{Le Gac2016,
author={David Le Gac},
title={Somali as a tone language},
year=2016,
booktitle={Speech Prosody 2016},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2016-60},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2016-60},
pages={292--296}
}