Tonal Alignment and Prosodic Word domain in Boro

This paper discusses the way morphological factors influence the distribution of lexical tones in Boro. Another objective of this paper is to unravel the underlying tonal nature of various prefixes and suffixes that participate in these processes. Boro is a tone language belonging to the Tibeto-Burman group. The language lexically distinguishes L and H tones. The TBU in Boro is the syllable and the lexical tone surfaces on the rightmost syllable both in derived and non-derived disyllabic words (Sarmah, 2004). The study presented here is based on data collected from 5 male speakers of Boro. The data set consisted of 175 scripted sentences containing the target words. The sentences were analysed by extracting their pitch contour using the softwarePraat5.3.04_win32 (Boersma and Weenink, 2012). Results show that tonal specification of the affixes in Boro is related to a minimally disyllabic stem condition. Suffixes surface with their tone when they follow a disyllabic stem. Otherwise they surface with the lexical specification of the stem itself. This paper tries to show how a minimally disyllabic prosodic word domain condition regulates the occurrence of tones in Boro. This paper also tries to describe the prosodic status of derived and non-derived words in Boro.