proto-southwestern-tai revised: a new reconstruction - seals 22

Mulao Tone Neutralization 75
While the claim that consonants are directly associated with a tone is contentious 4 , I argue
that consonants and tone form a dependency relationship in the output. This proposal
accounts for the co-occurrence restriction in Mulao, and it also explains consonant-tone
interaction in general.
Formally, consonant-tone interaction results from the requirement that all segments
in the output must belong to a tonal domain, which is ensured by the markedness constraint
ROOTNODE→T (RT→T). This constraint assigns violation marks to segments that do not
belong to any tonal domain in the output (cf. Yip, 2002: 83).
It is crucial to this proposal that there are no faithfulness constraints that preserve
the dependency relationship between tone and consonants. This lack of faithfulness
constraints means that tones are never contrastive on consonants. So, no language will
have a contrast between [pà̀] with low tone on the [p] and [pá̀] with high tone on the [p].
Consonant-tone interaction is the result of markedness constraints dominating tonal
faithfulness constraints. The laryngeally marked elevator consonants affect the tone on
their syllable due to the markedness constraint *ELEVATOR-L (*ELV-L). The *ELEVATOR-
L constraint gives a violation mark to elevator consonants that form a dependency
relationship with a low register tone in the output domain.
The main points of the proposal are summarized in (3).
(3) Proposal
a. Consonants form a dependency relationship with tone.
b. There is no faithfulness constraint that preserves tone on consonants.
c. Markedness constraints
i. ROOTNODE→T: All root nodes in the output should be parsed into a tonal
domain.
ii. *ELEVATOR-L: Elevator consonants should not be parsed into a low
register tone domain.
The tonal faithfulness constraints are proposed in order to specifically target tone
bearing units (TBUs) that are prosodic nodes such as moras (or syllables).
(4) Tonal faithfulness constraints (cf. Yip, 2002: 83)
a. DEP-T The tone associated to a TBU in the output has a corresponding tone
in the input.
b. MAX-T The tone associated to a TBU in the input has a corresponding tone
in the output.
c. IDENT-T The tone associated to a TBU in the output has the same
specification with the correspondent tone in the input.
The representation of a syllable with an elevator onset is shown in (5). Association
lines in this representation indicate the dependency relationship between tone and a
segment (cf. Myers, 1997). Segments associated with the same tone in the output form a
4 The dependency relationship between tone and consonants should be distinguished from the relationship
between tone and prosodic nodes, which are called Tone Bearing Units (TBUs). For a discussion on TBUs
being segments or prosodic nodes, see Bradshaw (1995: 267-269).