Tone in Navajo

Description

Source: Anthropological Linguistics, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 503-540Published by: The Trustees of Indiana University on behalf of Anthropological LinguisticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30028725Navajo is generally classified as a tone language. Yet an important and large class of verbal morphemes, the morphs of the conjunct domain, are reported to be underlyingly toneless. The relationship between the redundancy of the vowels of many of these morphs, their inflectional status, and their tonelessness is unexplored and calls for an explicit investigation before the categorical assumptions behind traditional phonological classification can be applied. This article reports on an instrumental investigation of the tonal system of Navajo and the relationship of these results to its phonology and typology. Navajo is shown to be a tone language insofar as each syllable carries a tonal specification. However, tone specification is very stable, and the tone contours are apparently sensitive to the morphological boundaries in the word. This co-occurrence indicates that mapping between phonology and phonetics in Athabaskan, as well as the arguably attendant tonal variation in the family, is best accounted for by clearly defined implementation strategies more characteristic of laboratory phonology than of pure autosegmental analyses.