Complex interplay of lexical stress and focus prominence in Tohono O'odham

This paper explores how the linguistic contrast (focus prominence) is realized with the rhythmic and timing pattern, evidenced in the typologically rare and complex plural noun reduplication (CVC → CVCVC; e.g., ban “a coyote” versus baban “coyotes”) in Tohono O'odham (TO). Our preliminary result of two native speakers of TO indicates that the greater focus effects (lexically and morphologically contrastive focus) are realized with the higher f0 at the first CV sequence and the lower f0 at the second CV sequence, strengthening the language-specific strong-weak (SW) stress pattern. However, no focus effect was found on the durational properties. Also, no significant morphologically contrastive focus effect, contrasting singular and plural forms of the target words, was found on both f0 and durational properties. Our finding implies that the realization of prosodic and phonological elements in Tohono O'odham is also conditioned with fine-grained phonetic details. We also discuss the future possibility of the complex phonetics-prosody interplay of the language.