The Phonetic Realization of Pitch Accent in Huave

0. Introduction Huave 1 is a language isolate spoken in four villages on the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico: San Mateo, San Francisco, San Dionisio, and Santa Maria. This paper examines the pitch accent system in the San Mateo dialect, the only dialect which has preserved lexical tone. In this paper, “pitch accent” is used broadly to refer to the interaction of lexical tone and phrasal accent (see Hyman (2007) for other uses of the term). On the surface, the syllable with pitch accent in San Mateo Huave bears either a high (H) or falling (HL) tone. The functional load of this distinction is low, and there are only a few minimal pairs differentiated solely by tone. However, the system is of typological interest, since the standard phonological analysis (Noyer (1991), see Yip (2002:220-221) for a concise summary) treats L as both the default tone and the only tone marked in underlying representations. Furthermore, there is widespread tone spreading in the language that gives rise to phrasal tonal plateaus (see Pike and Warkentin 1961, Pak 2007); the current study focuses only on lexical tone and words in isolation, and thus cannot address the phenomenon of tone spreading. Prior phonological analyses of pitch accent in Huave have been based on the impressionistic transcriptions of Pike and Warkentin (1961), but have not had access to detailed phonetic data. This paper fills a descriptive need, in that it provides empirical facts about tone and vowel duration that can inform the phonological analysis. The paper is structured is follows: Section 1 gives a description of the tonal system. Section 2 presents the results of a perception study that was conducted to confirm the robustness of the distinction between the two tones. Section 3 presents the details of a production study of 722 tokens (349 lexical types) representing a wide range of segmental environments. Finally,