Association of tones in Maltese

Abstract

In languages that have lexical stress, intonational pitch accents are reportedly restricted in their association to stressed syllables (e.g. Gordon 2014). By contrast, edge tones (boundary tones) are restricted in their association to phrasal edges (Jun 2014). However, certain post-focal tones, referred to as phrase accents, have association properties that are typical of both pitch accents and edge tones: in addition to an association to the right edge of the phrase, they may have a secondary association to a lexically stressed syllable (Grice, Ladd & Arvaniti 2000) or to the right edge of a word (Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986; Pierrehumbert & Beckman 1988; Chahal & Hellmuth 2014), and in some cases the association can alternate. Alternation in association of these post-focal tones is phonologically conditioned, that is, the association depends on the metrical structure of the words under investigation.