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Revitalizing Endangered Languages

Edited by Justyna Olko & Julia Sallabank

Revitalizing Endangered Languages "This guidebook provides ideas and strategies, as well as some background, to help with the effective revitalization of endangered languages. It covers a broad scope of themes including effective planning, benefits, wellbeing, economic aspects, attitudes and ideologies."

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Academic Paper


Title: An OT Analysis of the Tonal Phenomena of Bodo
Author: Priyankoo Sarmah
Email: click here TO access email
Homepage: http://priyankoo.com/web/
Institution: Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati
Linguistic Field: Phonology
Subject Language: Bodo
Abstract: Bodo is a Tibeto-Burman tone language spoken in many parts of the Northeastern states of India as well as in parts of Bangladesh and Nepal./L//L/In some of the previous works tonal phenomena in Bodo is described at length (Sarmah 2003, 2004). Bodo has two lexical tones, namely High (H) and Low (L) and a default Mid (M) tone. It has an interesting tone assignment pattern where a lexical tone is assigned to the rightmost edge of the prosodic word and the default tone is assigned elsewhere. In this paper we would like to give an Optimality Theory (OT) account of the tonal phenomena in Bodo./L//L/We notice that Type I derivations in Bodo follow the tone assignment pattern of the non-derived polysyllabic lexical entries allowing us to assign the word formation process to level I of Bodo lexical phonology model (Kiparsky, 1985). We saw three possibilities in this type, as following:/L//L/ Ti Tj Tiàφ Tj/L//L/a. [[stem] suffix] è [[stem] suffix]/L//L/ prwd prwd/L//L/ T T/L//L/b. [[stem] suffix] è [[stem] suffix]/L//L/ prwd prwd/L//L/ /L//L/ T T/L//L/c. [prefix[stem]] è [prefix[stem]] /L//L/ prwd prwd/L//L/In all these cases the derived form follows the right aligned lexical tone assignment pattern. If there is a lexical tone that is not right aligned, it is either transferred to the right of the prosodic word or deleted if the right of the lexical item is already specified with a tone. In case of (a) type of derivations, we see that the tone of the suffix is preserved whereas the tone of the stem is lost. This prompts us to arrive at the conclusion that MAX Sf LT>> MAX Stm LT is underlyingly present in Bodo derivations./L//L/However when we look into Bodo derivations it does not necessarily follow the above mentioned tone assignment pattern. Some of the derivations that do not follow the right aligned type of tone assignment can be exemplified as below:/L//L/(1)Mnōng+Hthang+mōn àMnōng+Hthang+Hmōn/L//L/ “you (hon.)+ mōn à you (hon., plural)”/L//L/ /L//L/(2) +Hkham+Lhoà+HkhamLho/L//L/ “burn+ho à “to make burn”/L//L/In our analysis we overcome the problems of analyzing (1) and (2) type of problems while being in the domain of OT.
Type: Individual Paper
Status: Completed
Venue: MCWOP 11, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)
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