ON THE UNIVERSALITY OF PROSODIC REFLEXES OF CONTRAST: THE CASE OF YUCATEC MAYA

Frank Kügler & Stavros Skopeteas
Institut für Linguistik, Universität Potsdam

ID 1188
[full paper]

This paper is about the prosodic realization of contrastive focus in Yucatec Maya. Examining sentences with in situ focused adjectives (postverbally) we observe neither durational differences as compared to non-contrastive sentences nor any differences in F0. Yucatec Maya being a tone language seems use prosodic means exclusively to express tonal contrasts, thus belonging to a language type without marking contrast prosodically.