Suprasegmental Phonology Essay

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Suprasegmental Phonology Pitch Each syllable of a spoken 'content' word (that is, with the exception of 'empty' words like demonstratives and most pronouns) receives a distinct tone or pitch, that can be either high or low. (UPPERCASE = high tone) dubelete DU BE le te dilaya di LA YA decha DE cha feri fe RI Senu Yivokuchi uses level 'register' tones; that is, each syllable starts and ends at the same pitch, as in Japanese, and unlike Mandarin Chinese (which uses 'contour' tones). Also like in Japanese, SYV words follow a few basic pitch patterns. If the word is monosyllabic, it may be low or high pitched. All but a few words in Senu Yivokuchi that are polysyllabic have a pitch change between two of their syllables. This change may be a rise or a fall. There must be a change, there must be only one, and it must be somewhere after the first syllable and before the last one. In addition to this, the pitch change must leave at least as many syllables after itself as it leaves before. That is, a 3-syllable word must have its pitch change after the first syllable, leaving one syllable before it and two after it. The pitch pattern of a word is indicated (throughout these pages and in the dictionary) as a number plus a mark. The number represents the syllable after which the change is located, and the mark shows whether it is a pitch fall (a backslash, '') or a pitch rise (a forward slash, '/'). For example: adamet [1/] a DA MET seosie [1\] SEO sie dubelet [2\] DU BE let ... The last example seems to violate the rule that more syllables should be before than after the pitch change; but dubelet is a verb root, which always appears with an inflection that adds at least

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