Layered feet and syllable-integrity violations: The case of Copperbelt Bemba bounded tone spread

Abstract

We identify evidence supporting two amendments to standard metrical theory: the inclusion of layered feet, and the allowance of syllable-integrity violations, where a foot parses some, but not all, of a syllable’s constituents. The evidence comes from a High tone spreading process attested in Copperbelt Bemba (CB), which as reported by Bickmore and Kula (2013) et seq., occurs over a ternary domain. In quintessentially metrical fashion, the domain is sensitive to the presence and position of heavy syllables. Thus, we argue that metrical theory should take the CB data into account. CB ternary spreading can occur in contexts with an abundance of unparsed syllables on either side of the domain. We argue that this property is problematic for ‘Weak Layering’ accounts using binary feet (McCarthy and Prince 1986; Hayes 1995), which revolve around the minimal presence of unparsed syllables. We propose an alternative account using layered feet (Martínez-Paricio and Kager 2015), specifying an inner quantity-sensitive iamb and a strictly monomoraic adjunct. We show that a principled characterization of the spreading domain is that tone associates to all and only footed moras. We argue that a metrical analysis provides a more principled account of the data than can be achieved by Bickmore and Kula’s purely autosegmental analysis. Finally, we show that foot-based accounts of CB ternary spreading predict syllable-integrity violations (SIVs), where parsing consumes only the first of two tautosyllabic moras. Contrary to the common view that SIVs are universally disallowed, we embrace this result and put it in a typological context. We adopt an Optimality Theory constraint set to model SIVs (Kager and Martínez-Paricio 2018b), and extend it, paving the way for a typological investigation of SIVs.