Lexical tone in Gaelic
Several authors have suggested that Gaelic makes some use of lexical tone. Borgstrøm (1940, 53) states that all stressed syllables have rising tone, and all unstressed syllables have falling tone. This rising tone is easiest to hear on words with long stressed vowels or diphthongs;
short stressed vowels do have rising tone, but it is not as easy to hear as there is not as much time for the tone to rise. Borgstrøm (1940, 54) likens this use of tone to his own native Norwegian, and suggests its use in Gaelic is the result of contact with Old Norse in early medieval times. For Borgstrøm then, lexical tone is linked to syllabicity: monosyllabic words have rising tones Ű, and polysyllabic words have a rising-falling tones ŰŮ. Oftedal (1956, 28) also suggests that pitch and syllabicity are closely connected in Gaelic. Monosyllabic words have a rising or level tone, whereas polysyllabic words have a rise-fall or fall. Oftedal interprets these pitch distinctions as a syllabification strategy rather than the existence of lexical tone, but the result is the same: pitch distinctions based on the number of syllables in a word. Dorian (1978, 37) also comments on some use of lexical pitch differences similar to Swedish.
Ternes (2006) specifically refers to Scottish Gaelic as a ‘pitch accent’ language in his (revised) description of Applecross (north-west mainland) Gaelic. According to Ternes, Gaelic has two contrastive pitch accents and all stressed words have one of the two pitch accents.
Ternes states that the pitch accent distinctions made in Gaelic are similar to those made in his own native dialect of German from Trier, a tonal situation described in Gussenhoven (2004).
Similar to Borgstrøm (1940), Ternes (1980) and (2006, 141) claims that the pitch accent distinctions made in Gaelic are due to contact influence from Old Norse, although Iosad (fc. 2014) argues that the Gaelic pitch accents may have arisen independent from contact with Norse.
Realisation of lexical tone in Gaelic
Unlike Swedish, which has around 350 pairs of words distinguished by tone alone (G˚arding 1989, 65), Gaelic has few minimal pairs separated by a tone distinction. However, some near minimal pairs have been the subject of phonetic studies by Bosch & De Jong (1997) and Ladefoged, Ladefoged, Turk et al. (1998). Near minimal pairs often arise from a class of words with an inserted epenthetic vowel, for example, ainm ‘name’ /EñEm/, and similar words containing a phonemic vowel e.g. anam ‘soul’ /an@m/. Bosch & De Jong (1997) investigate this pair of words and found a falling pitch in both (produced in isolation), but the fall was consistently produced later in ainm, the word with an epenthetic vowel. These results are, however, for Barra Gaelic, a southern Hebridean dialect. Ladefoged, Ladefoged, Turk
et al. (1998) conducted analyses on Lewis Gaelic and looked at three near minimal pairs:
1. balg ‘belly’ /palGak/ - ballag ‘skull’ /palG.ak/
2. duan ‘poem’ /t˜u˜an/ - dubhan ‘fish hook’ /tu.an/
3. b`o ‘cow’ /po:/ - bogha ‘underwater rock’ /po.@/
In each case these authors found that monosyllabic words (the first of the pair listed here) had a rising pitch, and disyllabic words had a falling pitch. Schematised f0 contours from the findings of this study are in Figure 8.1.
Time
f0
Time
f0
Time
f0
balg ballag duan dubhan bò bogha
Figure 8.1: Schematised f0 contours from minimal tone pairs in Ladefoged, Ladefoged, Turk et al. (1998).
When a suffix is added to a monosyllabic word, this word behaves like a disyllabic word tonally (Ternes 2006, 137). These results appear consistent with the dialect descriptions of Borgstrøm (1940) and Oftedal (1956) that monosyllables have rising pitch and polysyllables have (rising-)falling pitch. The results are also consistent for what is reported in Old Norse.
Haugen (1967) explains that in Old Norse, the type of pitch accent found on a word depended on whether a word was mono- or polysyllabic. Following the Swedish tradition, for example Bruce (1977), I refer to the monosyllabic Gaelic rise as Accent 1; and the more complex polysyllabic fall/rise-fall as Accent 2 (contra Ternes (2006)).
Syllabicity in Gaelic
From the examples listed here, it is clear that in Gaelic lexical tone and syllabicity are linked, but the criteria for defining syllabicity are not straightforward. For example the word balg ‘belly’ /palGak/ is considered to be monosyllabic, while ballag ‘skull’ /palG.ak/ is considered disyllabic. Similarly, duan ‘poem’ /t˜u˜an/ is considered as monosyllabic and containing a diphthong, while dubhan ‘fish hook’ /tu.an/ is considered as disyllabic. Two interesting classes of words are involved here: words with an epenthetic or ‘svarabhakti’
vowel which is pronounced but not represented in orthography such as balg /palGak/, and
‘hiatus’ words containing consonants which were usually historically pronounced but are now only orthographically represented such as dubhan /tu.@n/ (Ternes 2006, 133).
The clearest account of the links between syllabicity and tone is put forward in Ternes (2006) with reference to the historical development of Gaelic. This author states that in Old
Irish the intervocalic consonants in, for example, dubhan were pronounced, and the word was more prototypically disyllabic with two clear vocalic intervals. Sound change resulted in the intervocalic consonant being lost. In words where the vowels either side of the lost intervocalic fricative consonant were the same, the word in modern Gaelic merely usually contains a long vowel. In words where the two vowels were different, the word usually remained disyllabic, and the syllabic boundary previously realised as a consonant became integrated into the tonal system. A second group of hiatus words were already produced with
‘hiatus’ in Old Irish, for example, modern Gaelic fitheach ‘raven’ /fi.@x/ < Old Irish fi¨ach. In Scottish Gaelic, hiatus in these inherited hiatus words was marked orthographically in the same way as hiatus words arising from sound change: by non-pronounced -th, -dh or -gh.
Similarly, words with a svarabhakti vowel in modern Gaelic were not produced with this vowel in Old Irish. When speakers began producing words such as balg /palGak/ with an extra vowel, the monosyllabic nature of the word remained tonally (Ternes 2006, 132).
The pronunciation of svarabhakti vowels is evidenced in the earliest distinctly ‘Gaelic’ text, The Book of Deer( ´O Maolalaigh 2008b, 198). Do Gaelic speakers perceive these suggested differences in syllabicity? Dialect descriptions such as Borgstrøm (1940) and Oftedal (1956) suggest this is the case. The syllabic makeup of svarabhakti words is nuanced in experimental work by Hammond, Davis, Warner et al. (under review). These authors suggest that speakers from Skye perceive words containing a svarabhakti vowel as consisting of slightly more than one syllable, but slightly less than two syllables. It is clear from their series of experiments that words containing a svarabhakti vowel are phonologically different to similar words containing a non-svarabhakti vowel. There is also some historical evidence that words containing a svarabhakti vowel were syllabically unusual: Greene (1952) argues for three syllable quantities in Old Irish [1] short, [2] long, and [3] half-long including words now produced with a svarabhakti word in modern Scottish Gaelic. His evidence is from verse texts where ‘half-long’ syllables appear in metrically different contexts to ‘short’ and ‘long’
syllables.
While Ternes’ argument perhaps explains the historical development of tone in the svarab-hakti and hiatus words, it is not clear whether in modern Gaelic, syllables are defined according to the pitch pattern of a word, or a word’s pitch pattern stems from the number of syllables it contains. In a recent phonological analysis, Iosad (fc. 2014) claims that the syllable is the contrastive unit, and pitch patterns follow from this. Perhaps it is not even possible to make the distinction, as argued in Haugen (1949) cited in Oftedal (1956, 25), prosody and syllabicity are so inextricably entwined that it is very difficult to separate the two. Out of convenience in this analysis, whether a word is defined as Accent 1 or Accent 2 is defined according to how many syllables it would be awarded in the dialect descriptions of Borgstrøm (1940), Oftedal (1956), and Ternes (2006): words with a svarabhakti vowel are considered monosyllabic, and ‘hiatus’ words are considered polysyllabic.
The interaction of intonation and lexical tones
As all languages are generally considered to have intonation, it must be ascertained how intonation and lexical tones interact. Borgstrøm is the only author who specifically comments on this question in Gaelic. He notes that the sentence as a whole is usually falling. If the last syllable has a (lexical) rising tone, this is often very reduced (Borgstrøm 1940, 53).
Although little research has been conducted on Gaelic tone and intonation, research on Swedish by Bruce (1977) examines just this issue. Bruce found that at the end of each Swedish intonational phrase there is typically a low boundary tone, and sometimes this is instead high tone indicating the speaker is going to continue speaking (Gussenhoven 2004, 211). Additionally, a high tone indicates the end of the focus constituent. If a sentence has broad focus, this high will occur after all lexical pitch accents and before the final low. If narrow focus on one particular element is intended, the high will occur after the focussed element’s lexical accents. Ambrazaitis (2009) demonstrates that intonational tones in Swedish are more complex than previous accounts (Bruce 1977; Gussenhoven 2004) suggest. But even in different and complex intonational contexts, lexical tone differences are maintained.
Only one previous published study has specifically examined intonational tone in Scottish Gaelic, MacAulay (1979). This study is a descriptive account of some of the common phrase-final pitch contours in the author’s native dialect of Bernera, Lewis. In agreement with Oftedal (1956, 36) and Dorian (1978, 37), MacAulay (1979) notes that the default final contour in any phrase is a fall. Rises are usually used to signal an interrogative which is not syntactically marked as such. For example, Cheannaich e leabhar? ‘He bought a book?’
has the exact syntactic form of declarative Cheannaich e leabhar ‘He bought a book’, but can be marked as interrogative by a final rise. This study does not mention lexical tones and does not consider their interaction with intonational tones. MacAulay’s study is a descriptive account of intonation. As such he uses terms such as ‘high’, ‘medium’ and ‘low’ tones, which are similar to the H and L tones within Autosegmental Metrical phonology, although in MacAulay’s analysis these are not meant as the phonological AM units. Although this previous description of Gaelic intonation refers to the existence of a ‘medium’ tone, I have conducted my analysis within the AM framework and do not use this label (Ladd 2008, 60).
While little is known about intonational tone in Gaelic, the intonation of closely related Irish is well documented (Dalton & N´ı Chasaide 2003, 2005; Dalton 2007, 2008; O’ Reilly, Dorn & N´ı Chasaide 2010; Dorn, O’ Reilly & N´ı Chasaide 2011). These publications are the output of a major project based at Trinity College Dublin to document the intonation patterns of Irish dialects within the Autosegmental Metrical framework. Data are taken from a corpus of read sentences comparing several dialects of Donegal, Connaught and Kerry.
Results suggest a north/south split, with Donegal (northern) patterning distinctly differently to Connaught and Kerry (southern) dialects. In Donegal the common intonation pattern in declaratives is a series of accentual rises including phrase-finally, whereas a series of accentual falls is typical in the southern dialects.