The aim of this study is to investigate how the presence of lexical tones influences the realization of focal accent and sentence intonation. The language studied is Kammu, a language particularly well suited for the study as it has both tonal and non-tonal dialects. The main finding is that lexical tone exerts an influence on both sentence and focal accent in the tonal dialect to such a strong degree that we can postulate a hierarchy where lexical tone is strongest followed by sentence accent, with focal accent exerting the weakest influence on the FO contour.
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