| boundary
of the grammatical unit of word and can be called external open juncture
(ยน). |
| iii) Terminal
junctures have the following distribution: |
a) Terminal
with rising pitch occurs for question and expresses surprise or doubt,
as in [ci ]
any of the three meanings can be understood according to the context. |
| b) Terminal
with falling pitch occurs to exemplify, indicate, express grief or
pity, reply in ‘yes’ or ‘no’, givin g directions,
enumerating (where a comma is used) etc. |
| c) Terminal
with sustained pitch occurs as a pause in course of a plain statement
of facts, the duration for which may be short for comma and long for
a full stop, if not, the hearer may ask under confusion whether the
speaker means comma or a full stop. |
| 1.17.
Pitch variation and intonation patterns: |
| 1.17.0. Introductory:
Mundari is not a tonal language since the change of pitch on small
units of the language does not change the lexical content of the unit.
However, the pitch is condictioned by the position of the syllable
and is also used expressly with syntactic function in order to change
the implications or shades of meaning. Some people may suspect tone
on word level in examples like [laai?]. But such a perception is due
to combined effect of a long vowel followed by a glottalized [i]. |
| Pitch in Mundari
occurs always as a part of the sentence-intonation. |
| 1.17.1. Degrees and
types: Pitch is introduced in the connected speech as an associated
phonetic feature and varies a the degree of the loudness depending
upon individual use and the type of the loudness depending upon the
implications. The types as well as the degrees exist in a relative
sense and no absolute measurement can be fixed for any of them. |
| The
types of the pitches can be indicated with respect to the register
tone as 1,2 and 3 which represent the relative height. There is a
fourth type which can be termed as a contour tone which is of rising-falling
type. A musical pitch which is stretching or a contour tone to a fading
point is frequently heard in this dialect, which is used as the falling
terminal. These two latter pitches are predictable and non-phonemic. |
| The three register
pitchs vary as to the degrees in at least two days ‘high’
and ‘low’. Sometimes a third level may also be employed
as ‘mid’. While retaining the main characteristics of the
pitch the change in loudness is simply allophonic, used in free variation
and is almost arvitrary. The loudness of the contour pitch also changes,
high to low or even mid, in relationto the adjoining sounds. What
is more plausible to include such changes in the degree is the supra-intonational
feature of vacalizations of loud and soft. |
| 1.17.2. Distributional
positions: The distributin of these pitches are limited to the following
postions. The subsequent syllables maintain the pitch till the next
point of change reaches: |
|
Utterance
initial
|
|
Utternace
final
|
|
With glottalized
vowel
|
|
Stress
for emphais.
|
|
|
| Any of the three
pitches can occur in utterance initial and final. With stress for
emphasis only the pitch /3/ occurs, while pitch /2/ occurs for prominence. |
| With the vocalic
glottalization the common pitch is /1/ and generally does not vary
except for emphasis. |
| With the vocalic
duratin it is the contour which occurs. If this is accurately analyse
it will be found that the contour |
