UC Berkeley

Although stress systems and tonal systems have each been objects of prolonged linguistic study, and the prototypical members of each type of system are relatively well understood, prosodic systems that combine the characteristics of both stress and tone systems are less well studied, and continue to pose descriptive and theoretical challenges (Hyman 2006). The goal of this paper is to describe one such prosodic system, found in Iquito, a Zaparoan language of northern Peru, and to demonstrate that a parsimonious description of the word prosodic system of this language results from carefully distinguishing the stress and tone systems of the language and examining their interaction.

This strategy essentially puts into operation Hyman's (2009) call for property-driven approaches to word-prosodic typology in the analysis of so-called 'pitch-accent' systems. The Iquito word prosodic system consists of clearly distinguishable stress and tone systems, in which stress and tone have distinct acoustic correlates. Tonal minimal pairs exist in the language, but tone is also partially dependent on the position of primary stress. The density of tones in words is low, but the language also exhibits a requirement that each prosodic word carry at least a single high tone. If a given word exhibits no lexical tones, a high tone is assigned to the syllable bearing primary stress. The result is best described as a low-density tone system (one in which many syllables do not bear tone) that is partially dependent on metrical structure.