The interaction of laryngealized vowels, stress, and falling pitch in Mariteco Cora

This analysis considers for the first time the existence of interactions between pitch, stress, and laryngealization in Mariteco Cora phonology. We present pilot case studies of two speakers to determine whether Mariteco Cora has phonologically contrastive tone in addition to lexical stress, as suggested by Casad (n.d.). Distributional and phonetic analysis of words in isolation indicate that lexically specific pitch patterns do not represent an independent contrast. Rather, falling pitch is one of various possible cues to vowel laryngealization, which appears to have a wide range of phonetic realization strategies (cf. Gerfen & Baker 2005 on Mixtec). Our data suggest that the selection and use of different cues to laryngealization depends partly on linguistic factors, particularly stress, but also shows intra- and interspeaker variation whose conditioning is presumably extralinguistic in nature.