Friday, October 31, 2008

Still busy

Mostly I just wanted to post to say I still won't be posting much for the next month or so. This past month in addition to my teaching and taking classes I was working on presentations for two conferences, an abstract submission for a conference in March, and my application for the Javits fellowship, as well as trying to get funding for said conferences. In the next few weeks I'll be finishing up my NSF fellowship application as well as two other conference presentations. Once I'm finished with those I get to turn my attention to my thesis prospectus, my five Ph.D. program applications, and two papers I'm submitting for conference proceedings. So it'll probably be a while before I'm posting regularly again.

Since I don't have time for a detailed thought-out post, I'll simply pose a question today:

Does the existence of a phonemic tonal system in a language rule out the possibility of a prosodic stress system in that language?

5 comments:

NW said...

I know it's an old post, but maybe giving a tenuous answer will revive posts.

I see no reason that the two can't co-occur. The prosody could just be added to the tone, or it could have some rules that modify the tone patterns more than just increasing or decreasing.

Ryan Denzer-King said...

I agree! I'm working on a paper on stress in Navajo, and on of the things I want to look at is a comparison of vowel length and pitch in "stressed" vs. "unstressed" syllables. While Navajo has phonemic vowel length and tone, I'm hoping to find differences by comparing short vowels to short vowels, high tones to high tones, etc.

linguistpro.net said...

Sorry for being rude. But what is the practical effect of the answer to this question?

Ryan Denzer-King said...

What is the practical effect of the answer to any question? I was hoping to spark discussion of the possibility of overlap between different types of prosodic systems.

Anonymous said...

Internet-users are sometimes unpredictable. And the most unpredictable about them is why they start discussing something and why they do not. :)