Tone and Pitch Accent in Cherokee Nouns

Abstract

Tone in Cherokee nouns is described in this paper as a hybrid system of metrical pitch accent and lexical tone. Four speakers of Oklahoma Cherokee spoke nouns in a frame dialog that put each of thirty-seven nouns in citation form, in a declarative sentence, a question, and with contrastive focus. In addition to an optional L*H pitch accent that may occur on the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable only, and three distinctive tones (L fall, H, and H fall) that are restricted to occur only on non final, unaccented syllables, the study also identifies some aspects of Cherokee intonation contours.