Acoustic Evidence of Floating Lexical Tones in Tal Grammatical Tone Replacement

The associative linkers in Tal trigger grammatical tones on nouns modified by nominals, which obligatorily agree with the deictic properties of the linkers. The exponent of the proximal linker is the tone feature [+raised] that raises the final tone of the modified nouns, while the exponent of the non-proximal linker is the set of tone features [$-$raised, $-$upper] that lowers every tone of the modified nouns. Specifically, the exponent of the proximal linker replace the final tone-bearing unit (henceforth TBU), while that of the non-proximal linker replaces every TBU of the modified nouns. By measuring fundamental frequency (F0) and duration, we investigate the phonetic realization of the grammatical tones and whether the replaced lexical tones are deleted or floated. The phonetic realizations of the proximal and non-proximal linkers align with tone raising and lowering, respectively. We also find evidence indicating that the replaced lexical tones float. The implications of our findings are discussed in the ACAL 56 proceedings. This OSF folder contains the audio files, TextGrids, and R code that form the basis of the work.