Tonosyntax and reference restriction in Dogon NPs

Lexical tone melodies of words and word strings in Dogon languages are overridden by syntactically conditioned word-level or broader tone overlays. In Ben Tey and other Dogon languages, certain NP-internal elements—possessors, adjectives, relative clauses, demonstratives—are controllers , imposing overlays such as {L} and {HL} on adjacent words or word strings (the targets). Other elements (nonsingular quantifiers, discourse-functional morphemes) do not control overlays. The semantic generalization is that reference restrictors are controllers, while non-reference restrictors are not. Tonosyntactic processes have access to input stem-class categories and seman-tic/pragmatic groupings thereof, input phonological features (tone of the adjacent edge of the controllers), prosodic weight of the target, and, with possible minor exceptions, linear adjacency. Such operations can only be accounted for in a model of grammar with an enriched syntax-phonology interface.* 1. Introduction. 1.1. Tonosyntax. We define tonosyntax as a productive system whereby words or phrases of particular syntactic categories (e.g. adjective, possessor NP) systematically impose tone overlays on other words or word strings. We call the former (tonosyn-tactic) controllers and the latter (tonosyntactic) targets. Such overlays often extend over more than one word. Lexical tone melodies of targets are disregarded in the choice of tone overlays and are erased (overridden, overwritten) by them. Overlays (enclosed in curly brackets) that are attested in Dogon NPs are {L}, {HL}, {LH}, and {H}. 1 Lexical melodies (enclosed in slashes) that they erase include /H/, /HL/, /LH/, /LHL/, and rarely /HLH/ for uncompounded stems. For example, lexically /LH/-toned Ben Tey nǎ: 'cow(s)' has {L} overlay (i.e. tone-lowering) in nà: before an adjective, and {HL} overlay in nâ: after some types of possessor. In Dogon languages, tone overlays also occur in verb derivation and inflection, compounding , and occasionally in clausal subordination (purposive clauses). This article deals only with NP-internal tonosyntactic processes and focuses on their ontology, that is, the nature of the input elements that trigger them, and the general form of the processes themselves. Details of phonological implementation that reflect regular tonal phonology are disregarded here where possible, as is the resolution of conflicts among potentially competing controllers. Descriptively, we show that controllers and noncontrollers correlate with distinct sets of stem classes (e.g. adjective versus numeral). We theorize that controllers are the set of stem classes that restrict reference, in a particular sense described in §5. Aside from the fact that overlays are expressed phonologically, as tonal patterns, the input phonological form of the controller …