Basque, Palenquero, and the typology of word-prosodic systems

José I. Hualde, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Typological classifications of prosodic systems based on binary features (such as presence vs. absence of lexical tone, presence vs. absence of contrastive stress, etc.) can be very useful as a first approximation to linguistic diversity in this domain. Nevertheless, such classifications necessarily offer us a somewhat incomplete picture, since different languages may possess a feature F to different extents. Gradual differences may produce prosodic systems that are substantially different from each other in spite of sharing the same basic properties. The converse may also be true: systems that would appear to be radically different, from their typological classification in terms of binary features, may be only slightly different from each other when examined in detail.

In this talk, I will argue that a more useful approach may be in terms of a number of recognized prosodic prototypes. A statement such as "language L is like Swedish except that x" may provide us with a more clear picture of the prosody of language L than its classification in terms of binary features. I will illustrate with examples from Basque and Palenquero, a creole language spoken in Colombia.