Intonational Patterns of Topic and Focus Constructions in Yucatec Maya

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Figure III-15: Pitch track of a subject-focused phrase Laala domingo-e' teen kin haats' ma'alob. Every Sunday, it is me who hits well Speaker M1

In the three sentences we can observe the same complex pitch contour LHLH* on the TOP phrase. I interpret this melody as the implementation of H-Faith and PP-Align. The first captures the fact that the lexical LH of the quantifier lala every is maintained, whereas the second describes the LH* of the corresponding TOP pitch accent. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that the highest prominence is carried by the quantifier, not by the TOP. In Figure 13 we can see that the focused phrase hunp'eel carries an LH* pitch accent, thereby indicating a new prosodic domain. It is also noteworthy to observe how the overall frequency corresponding to the TOP (i.e. the pitch aligned to the right-most phrase) is lower than both the lexical tone of the first word of the phrase (i.e. lala) and the highest pitch in the focused constituent on BF and NF. Figure 15 shows a rather different pattern. The focused phrase does not show any particular prominence, instead the pitch remains low, and a high peak is only reached towards the end of the sentence, on the HL tone of the word ma'aloob good. At the moment it is unknown whether the differential prominence of these two high tones in the LHLH* melody and the following LH* pitch accents is relevant in the phonology of YM intonation. Although this is a very common pattern, there are alternative realizations of topicalized phrases. Figure 16 and Figure 17 show the pitch track of sentences (11) and (12), respectively. These data illustrate a peculiar pattern previously