Lionnet (2025): Tonal languages without tone #

This file formalizes [Lio25]'s analysis of the word prosody of Drubea and Numèè (Oceanic, New Caledonia) as register features alone: an underlying downstep l on the mora, a postlexical epenthetic upstep h, and boundary features, with no tone feature. The stems of the two fragments carry only downsteps (stems_register_only), at most one per stem (stems_culminative, Rivierre's culminativity) though not per compound (compounds_not_culminative), and their tiers are exactly the three stem patterns ∅, l, ∅l associated by the syllabic alignment of Table 4 (stems_patterned), the loanwords of (54) being the one exception (loans_unpatterned). The alignment predicts that a syllable-internal downstep occurs only in monosyllables (associate_syllable_initial); the CVꜜV monosyllables are what makes the mora, not the syllable, the register-bearing unit (mora_is_rbu).

The postlexical derivation is downstep displacement (§4.6), the boundary features h% of Drubea and l% of Numèè (§4.8), and pre-downstep h-epenthesis (§4.4), realized by terracing from the baseline with the utterance-initial downstep unrealized (§4.5). Each is a Subregular.Docking process over the tier with its syllable boundaries written in, and each but the spreading variant of h-epenthesis has a quantifier-free guard ([CJ19]): displacement is spreading then delinking, both one step across a boundary; raising reads the next mora and, the syllables being at most bimoraic, one mora back within its own; the boundary features read the last two syllables. The realization reproduces Rivierre's pitch levels where he transcribes whole steps ((11), (19), (20), (24), (26), (30), (38), (53)) and, for every transcribed utterance, the direction of each step between syllables (rows_signs); the double downstep of (25), (52) and (53b) is a second l on one mora. Lionnet's rephrasing of [Leb18b]'s definitional properties of downstep and his placement of Drubea in [Hym06]'s typology — tonal by definition (3) but without stress accent, culminative in register while neither obligatory nor syllable-dependent (drubea_tonal, drubea_not_stressAccent) — close the file.

Implementation notes #

Shifts are unit steps, so the realization is ordinal: the source's half steps and the larger drops it transcribes after a raised syllable ((13b), (32), (62)), Rivierre's observation that raising rarely compensates the lowering, are not derived. The joins with the rows compare the sign of each step between syllables, a syllable's level being that of its last mora, over the tokens the source levels.
Displacement and h-epenthesis are optional in the source; each derivation applies the steps its surface transcription shows. H-epenthesis targets a registerless mora before a downstep unless the mora's own syllable is downstepped before it, which is what keeps /ꜜgoo/ at the baseline in (33) and /ꜜɳii/ unraised in (12). Spreading h-epenthesis ((16)) and the lh contour on a downstepped mora ((18), (63)) are stated on their own.
The quantifier-free processes are relabelling transductions over the register alphabet (Transduction.apply_relabel) and depend boundedly on both sides (raising_boundedDependence); spreading h-epenthesis has no quantifier-free guard (spreading_not_qf).
The comparison with a tonal alternative (§5) is prose and is not represented.

Lionnet (2025): Tonal languages without tone #

Implementation notes #

References #

Stem patterns (§4.2, Tables 2–4) #

Culminativity, register-only inventories, and the register-bearing unit #

Hyman's typology (§6.2) #

The postlexical derivation #

Locality #

Drubea utterances #

Numèè utterances #

Leben's properties of downstep (§6.1) #

The rows #