Eunice V. Pike

Immediate Constituents of Mazateco Syllables

1. It is well known that sentences have an internal structure which can be analyzed in terms of successive layers of immediate constituents.l Thus, the sentence Poor John ran away divides first into Poor John and ran away, then Poor John divides into Poor and John, while ran away divides into ran and away, and so on. It is convenient to describe syllables of Mazateco2 in a similar fashion. The structure of these syllables does not consist of a series of sounds equally related, like beads on a string, but is rather like an overlapping series of layers of bricks. The different

Problems in Zapotec Tone Analysis

Villa Alta Zapotec has three tone registers: high /1/, mid /2/, low /3/. These are demonstrated by CONTRASTIVE SETS. (A CONTRASTIVE SET may be defined as a group of tonesequence patterns, in some particular position, which differ only by one tone in the same relative place in the sequence; the segmental phonemes of a contrastive set do not have to be uniform.) Note the following contrastive sets, the first of which differ by slight segmental changes which are not pertinent to the tone contrast:3 de3zaln yal a lot of bamboo: de3zaln

The Phonology of Tenango Otomi.

1There are more than 7,000 speakers of Tenango Otomi centering around the town of Tenango de Doria, Hidalgo, Mexico. Miguel Plata P., about fifty-five years of age, was the principal informant. He is from a nearby town, San Nicolas. Richard C. Blight is responsible for the grammatical data, the vocabulary, and most of the segmental analysis in this article. Eunice V. Pike analyzed the tone and is responsible for the presentation of the materials.

Stress and Tone in the Phonology of Diuxi Mixtec

Each word in Diuxi Mixtec has a stressed syllable which is marked by a long vowel. In addition to this stress, some words have a second stress. This second stress occurs only on the last syllable of the word and is marked by intensity and by allotones of both high and low tone. There is a contrast of high versus low tone, and there are allotones which occur in relation to the presence versus absence of word-final stress.

THE PHONOLOGY AND TONE SANDHI OF MOLINOS MIXTEC

The Molinos dialect of Mixtec, like other Mixtec dialects has a twosyllable couplet as the nucleus of the phonological word (K. Pike, 1948: 79-80; Mak, 1953:87; Longacre, 1957:11). The couplet in the Molinos dialect is pertinent in the description of (1) the placement of word stress (see 1.1, Rules 2 and 4), (2) allophones of/k/, /i/, and of nasalized vowels (see 7 and 9), (3) allotones (see 5), (4) the distribution of phonemes (see 10), and (5) in the description of tone sandhi (see 11). Because of the importance of the couplet in description, the phonological word is treated first.

Tonemic-Intonemic Correlation in Mazahua (Otomi)

1 This paper was written at the University of Oklahoma, as a member of the staff of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. The data were gathered under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in a field trip in the fall of 1948 in collaboration with Hazel Spotts and Mildred Kiemele Muro. Some further data were added in a second trip in January 1950 and this material was presented, under a slightly different title, to the summer meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, 29 July 1950.