Accent in Carranza Tsotsil

The existence of phonological tone in Carranza Tsotsil (Mayan), proposed by Sarles (1966) and Kaufman (1972), has been controversial since Herrera (2013, 2014) rejected it. Based on phonetic evidence, we analyze word-level prosody in this language with both stress and tone. We describe two lexical accent classes, one underlyingly toneless and one with an initial L tone that manifests mutual repulsion with stress. Furthermore, we argue that accented suffixes bear a lexical H tone and that underlyingly toneless foot heads receive a metrical H tone, making Carranza Tsotsil a language with both tone-driven stress and stress-driven tone. We show that a tonal account explains several key aspects of Carranza Tsotsil prosody, especially in combination with phrasal prosody. We consider an alternative analysis based on stress only, but we argue that the existence of monosyllables with a contrastive low pitch makes a tonal approach preferable to a pure stress one.