Cumulativity and ganging in the tonology of Awa suffixes: Supplementary materials

This article revives old descriptive data on Awa, a Papuan language of the Kainantu group. The tonal system was described in detail in a paper by Loving (1973), where he reports a series of toneless noun suffixes, falling into six classes depending on their tonal alternations when combined with a noun root. This article demonstrates that the suffixes are best understood as carrying lexical tone; the alternations in form arise from the interaction of typologically natural tonotactic constraints. While the system can be described in autosegmental terms without much difficulty, a formal constraint-based analysis is less straightforward. I show that strict ranking, as in optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004 [1993]), fails to capture the data patterns due to cumulativity effects, some of which cannot be naturally captured even with local constraint conjunction (Smolensky 2006). The data are successfully modeled in harmonic grammar (Legendre et al. 1990).

[ Download text file ] Cumulativity and ganging in the tonology of Awa suffixes: Online supplemental materials: Full tableaux

This tab-delimited text file is the basis of the analysis presented in this article. It contains full tableaux for all forms considered in the article and is formatted to be compatible as an input file to OT Help, OT Soft, or the Maxent Grammar Tool.

[ Download PDF ] Cumulativity and ganging in the tonology of Awa suffixes: Online supplemental materials: Key to full tableaux

This document provides a key to inputs and candidates for all forms in the full tableaux. Due to the limitations of tab-delimited text input files, autosegmental representations are not provided in text file. Instead, candidates are numbered (e.g. nahpo1, nahpo2).