Intonation in a pitch accent variety of Basque

The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the tone structure of Lekeitio Basque, with particular reference to the organization of tones in prosodic constituents. Although in recent years there has been a rise in researchers' interest in prosodic aspects of Basque phonology, this has been reduced almost entirely to the accentuation system of different dialects (cf. Hualde 1989, 1990, 1991abc, 1992, 1993abc, 1994,1997,1999, Hualde and Sagarzazu 1991, Hualde and Bilbao 1993, Hualde, Elordieta and Elordieta 1993, 1994, Gaminde and Hualde, 1995, and references therein). In this pilot study I focus on the intonational system of the Bizkaian dialect spoken in Lekeitio, a coastal town located in northeastern Biscay. In this dialect, tones are grouped in intonational units of different levels in a prosodic hierarchy, in a fashion similar to that of Japanese (cf. Beckman and Pierrehumbert 1986, Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988). First, there is a lexical pitch accent, of the shape H*+L, which is a property of the word level, i.e., it is assigned at the word level in the phonological representation. At a higher prosodic level, where words can be grouped, we find the accentual phrase, characterized by an initial %L boundary tone and a lexical or phrasal pitch accent (H*+L). These accentual phrases can be grouped into higher levels of prosodic structure, which we call intermediate phrases. These are the domains where downstep or catathesis applies. A syntactic maximal projection constitutes an intermediate phrase, unless it is the leftmost phrase in the sen-