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English Phonology Task
English Phonology Task
COPY FROM:
Contours and Tone Clusters in lau
Author(s): A. Edmondson, Janet Bateman, and Helen Miehle
Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Berk
eley Linguistics
Society: Special Session on The Typology o f Tone Languag
es (1992)
pp. 92-103
Iau Language
lau, a Non-Austronesian tone
language of Irian Jaya. lau is one of three
varieties of Turu, an SOV Non-Austronesian language of the Lakes
Plains District
of Irian Jaya, Indonesia spoken by about 400 people living in the
villages of Faui
and Bakusi along the Van Daalan River. According to a classificatio
n by Voorhoeve
(1975), lau belongs to the Tor-Lakes Plains Stock and is an isolate
with no immediate
relatives. Nevertheless, there are a number of distantly related lan
guages spoken in
this same district which also have pitch contrasts. Irian Jaya
and Papua New
Guinea are not generally regarded as being geographic area with l
arge numbers of
tonal languages. However, lau and some other Lakes Plains la
nguages of this
area-Kaure, Obokuitai, Sikaritai. and Doutaiall make use of
pitch contrasts in
their phonological system, cf. preliminary descriptions in Dommel
(1991), Jenison
(1991), Martin (1991), and McAllister (1991). Of all these languag
es, however,
lau is the one with the most developed tonality.
lau segmental phonology. Although lau possesses a complex
system
Tone categorv
Tone
Tone
Tone
Tone
Tone
Tone
Tone
Tone
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
Tone value
44
33
45
23
42
43
32
423
he 3 level. Tone 4
and 5 were falling tones, both beginning somewhat higher than t
he 4 level. Tone 5
fell to a lower level than tone 4. Pending analysis of larger bodie
s of data, we will
maintain the current transcription of these two tones, 42 for Tone
5 and 43 for Tone
4. Tone 3 demonstrated a level 3 trajectory for the first twothirds of its course
followed by a fall to the 2 level. Therefore, we transcribe as 3
32 or more simply
32. Tone 2 has the only tone trajectory with a change of direc
tion. Like Tone 5
and Tone 4 it begins slightly higher than level 4 and drops to 2 b
efore rising. The
esults of this instrumental analysis confirm strongly the tone va
lues assigned by
Bateman (1991b) to the eight tone categories in lau. Tlie only syst
ematic discrepancy
seems to be that the falling tones begin slightly higher than des
cribed in Bateman
(1991b). Tone 2, whose trajectory changes direction, was also t
he l o ng e s t .