2.1 Review of evidence for tonal marking of absolutive case

Yu (2011, 2017); Yu and Özyıldız (2016) showed that absolutive case in Samoan is not unmarked and does in fact have a phonological correspondent in spellout. As shown in (2), revised from (1), a high tone—which we notate as ‘H-’ and gloss as ABS—appears at the right edge of the phonological material immediately preceding the absolutive argument: Before the object le mamanu ‘the design’ in the transitive clause (2a), and before the subject le malini ‘the marine’ in the intransitive clause (2b).

The notation ‘H-’ comes from conventions for the intonational transcription of tonal events developed in autosegmental-metrical theory (Pierrehumbert, 1980; Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 1986; Beckman & Elam, 1997; Ladd, 2008). The ‘H’ stands for a high F₀ target and the ‘–’ is a diacritic we use merely to indicate that the high tone is an edge tone associated to a word edge, rather than a pitch accent associated to a stressed syllable. Other morphosyntactic structures in addition to absolutive arguments also reliably surface with an H-, as we will discuss in detail in Section 4. By using the ‘–’ diacritic, we do not mean to imply that an H- is a prosodic boundary tone, associated to some prosodic constituent in a prosodic hierarchy; we simply mean to say, descriptively, that the tone appears at edges.⁶ Evidence that H- tones are edge tones and not pitch accents is given in Section 4.

The evidence Yu (2011, 2017) used to argue that an H- always appears before an absolutive argument came from directly comparing F₀ contours between minimally different syntactic structures elicited in fieldwork (see Figures 4 and 5 for examples of this kind of comparison). We emphasize that this evidence came from comparing F₀ contours rather than comparing intonational transcriptions (the same is true for all the evidence introduced in this paper, except for in Section 6). Yu (2011, 2017) showed that an H- appeared before the absolutive argument irrespective of diverse syntactic and semantic properties of the argument: Before subjects of intransitive clauses, objects of transitive predicates, proper names, pronouns, nominalized verbs, and regardless of specificity or number. Moreover, the presence of the absolutive H- was insensitive to argument order—e.g., in verb-initial ditransitives, the position of the H- tracks the left edge of the absolutive argument, regardless of the order of subject and objects—and the absolutive H- was absent before absolutive arguments that weren’t overt—e.g., in pro drop of absolutives and extraction of absolutives out of relative clauses.

In addition, H- tones were not observed before bare NPs in environments where bare NPs are independently expected not to be case marked (pseudo-noun incorporation constructions, which have surface VOS order) or where ergative and oblique case marking are also banned, e.g., on arguments in fronted predicates, see Yu and Özyıldız (2016, Section 3.4) for details. Moreover, although Calhoun (2017) shows that no H- appears before post-verbal absolutive arguments under [naɁo] ‘only’ and argues that this data is problematic for positing an absolutive H-, Yu and Özyıldız (2016, Section 3.4.1) and Yu (2017) show that no case markers can co-occur with [naɁo], whether segmental or the H-.

Finally, the presence of the absolutive H- was not sensitive to different focus conditions elicited in question-answer pairs over a range of focus conditions (broad focus, wh subject focus, corrective subject focus, wh object/PP focus, corrective object/PP focus) and answer types (VSO, VOS, fronted subject, fronted object), for both transitives and intransitives (for more detail on the stimulus set, see Appendix A.2). An H- always appeared before the absolutive argument, and never before the ergative argument or oblique object (with some rare, non-systematic exceptions; see Section 6.1)—whether an argument was given, new, or under contrastive focus in the answers to the questions. This result is consistent with Calhoun’s (2015) results from intonational transcriptions for sentences, which also showed no evidence that the H- preceding the absolutive was sensitive to discourse structure. Utterances in that study were elicited under broad focus (‘What happened earlier’), question focus on the agent or direct object, and contrastive focus on the agent or direct object.

The phonetic realization of the absolutive high edge tone is shown in the context of entire utterances in Figure 1 and over a single word in Figure 2. Figure 1a displays an annotated F₀ contour for (2a), while Figure 1b displays an annotated F₀ contour for (2b). There are three different kinds of tonal events labeled in these figures: LH* (a rising pitch accent), H- (a high edge tone), and L-L% (an utterance final fall),⁷ which we discuss further in the context of Figure 2. We remind the reader that only the data in Section 6 comes from intonational transcription, while the rest of the data introduced in this paper comes directly from the F₀ contours. Nevertheless, it is still useful to discuss the tonal events in terms of intonational labels to describe general observations about their phonetic realization. By convention, we place the label for an LH* pitch accent over the primary stressed syllable it is associated to in all intonational transcription displays. We also segment the ergative and oblique case markers together with the last syllable of the preceding word, e.g., [ŋa e], [ni i] in the annotation of the F₀ contours, because it is very difficult to develop consistent criteria for deciding on where one vowel ends and another begins.⁸ There are two sites that illustrate the realization of the H- in Figure 1a and b: (a) The final syllable of the verbs ([lalaŋa] ‘weave’ and [ŋalue] ‘work’)—an H- keeps the F₀ contour high at the right edge of [ŋalue] in Figure 1b but the F₀ contour falls over the last syllable of [lalaŋa] in Figure 1a; and (b), the final syllable of [malini] shows an H- keeping F₀ high in Figure 1a, preceding the object, but not in Figure 1b, preceding the oblique PP, where F₀ falls over the last syllable of [malini].

Figure 1

F₀ contours in basic VS(O) declaratives. Pitch accent rises (LH*) occur over primary stressed syllables. An H- occurs before the absolutive object [le mamanu] ‘the design’ in Figure 1a and before the absolutive subject [le malini] ‘the marine’ in Figure 1b.

Figure 2

Phonetic realization of the absolutive high edge tone, contrasting: (a) When sentence-medial malini ‘marine’ is followed by an oblique PP, so H- is absent, see example (2b), vs. (b) when malini is followed by an absolutive argument, so H- is present, see example (2a). In both figures, malini receives a LH* pitch accent associated to the stressed penultimate syllable.

For a more detailed explication of LH* and H- tonal events, we turn to Figure 2. Figure 2a shows a representative F₀ contour over malini when it is the subject of the intransitive clause in (2b) and followed by an oblique PP: No H- appears at the right edge of malini. In contrast, Figure 2b shows a representative F₀ contour over malini when it is the subject of the transitive clause in (2a) and immediately followed by the object le mamanu: An absolutive H- appears at the right edge of malini. We emphasize that malini is not the absolutive argument in either of the figures; rather, the H- that appears on malini in Figure 2b marks the absolutive argument coming up immediately after malini, which is not shown.⁹

To describe the realization of the H-, we first need to explain the rising tonal events in both F₀ contours which we transcribe as ‘LH*,’ following Orfitelli and Yu (2009); Zuraw et al. (2014), where the ‘*’ is a diacritic from autosegmental-metrical theory that indicates pitch accenthood, and ‘L’ stands for a low pitch target.¹⁰ This is a pitch accent associated to the penultimate syllable, which receives primary stress. The basic footing pattern in Samoan, as observed in monomorphemes, consists of a moraic trochee at the right edge of the word (Zuraw et al., 2014). Primary stress is on the final vowel if it is long, e.g., la(ˈvaː) ‘energized,’ and otherwise on the penultimate vowel, e.g., ma (ˈlini) ‘marine.’ Thus, ma(ˈlini) has a rising pitch accent associated to the penultimate syllable, where the low F₀ valley appears around the onset of the stressed mora, and the high F₀ peak appears at or slightly later than the offset of the stressed mora (see also Orfitelli & Yu, 2009; Zuraw et al., 2014; Calhoun, 2015 for more on pitch accent realization). If the immediately following tonal event is another pitch accent, e.g., on mamanu in (2b), then the F₀ contour over malini falls after the high F₀ peak over the last syllable towards the L of this next pitch accent, as in Figure 2a. If however, an H- is present, then the F₀ contour continues to rise over the last syllable of malini, as in Figure 2b. Yu (2017) also shows that this high F₀ continues into the beginning of the absolutive argument, and the persistence of high F₀ into the absolutive argument can also be seen in Figures 4 and 5b.

In the remainder of this section, we provide additional empirical evidence that the syntax completely determines the presence of the high tone as an absolutive case marker. We show that the presence of the high tone is insensitive to prosodic length (Section 2.2), speech rate (Section 2.3), and speech register (Section 2.4). This sets up our initial picture of the syntax/prosody interface in Samoan in Section 3, for which we make the methodological abstraction that the moment that a parser detects a high tone, it can conclude that an absolutive argument is about to occur, i.e., we don’t consider multiple triggers of high tones yet (these include coordination and fronting). This is a good first step towards tackling the Samoan syntax-prosody interface, but we introduce evidence in Sections 4–6 to support complications to this picture that we adjust for in our analysis of the interface: Adjustments that reveal Samoan intonation to have some of the kinds of variability seen in other languages like English, though perhaps to a lesser extent.

2.2 Evidence for insensitivity of the absolutive high to prosodic length

If, in addition to syntax, prosody also played a role in determining the presence of the high tone as an absolutive case marker, i.e., if the high edge tone were a consequence of prosodic phrasing choices, then we would expect it to be sensitive to factors known to influence prosodic phrasing (other than syntactic constituency). A large body of work has suggested that prosodic restrictions that regulate size and eurythmy play a role in determining prosodic phrasing decisions, e.g., Nespor and Vogel (1986); Ghini (1993b, 1993a); Fodor (1998); E. Selkirk (2000); Prieto (2005). One general principle that has been discussed in the literature states that prosodic phrasing favors structures where sister prosodic constituents are roughly equal in prosodic size or weight, e.g., (Fodor, 1998, p. 304). A number of related optimality-theoretic constraints formulated in terms of the size of prosodic constituents (taking prosodic constituents more deeply embedded to be relatively smaller in size than those higher in the prosodic tree) have been proposed to drive prosodic phrasing choices that appear to mismatch with syntactic constituency. For instance, Myrberg (2013) accounts for variability in the prosodic phrasing of clauses with embedded structures in Stockholm Swedish by showing how a markedness constraint EQUALSISTERS (sister nodes in prosodic structure are instantiations of the same prosodic category) might underlie the well-formedness of prosodic phrasing choices that mismatch with syntactic constituency; see also related work in Irish (Elfner, 2012, 2015; Bennett et al., 2016).

If the presence of the absolutive high were conditioned on prosodic phrasing choices, we would expect to see variability in its presence, as well as variability in the presence of a high tone elsewhere in an utterance, depending on prosodic length/size. This section shows that we do not see such variability in the tonal marking of the Samoan absolutive.

2.2.1 Extremely long DPs

The first piece of evidence comes from sentences with extremely long DPs. In the sentences discussed in this section, shown in (3) and Table 1, the DPs X, Y are 17–28 syllables long. The sentences have the same basic syntactic structure as those in (2); they just have much longer DPs. In addition to potentially increasing the probability of a prosodic break between the two DPs or anywhere else in the utterance, having extremely long DPs also makes the phonetic realization of the H- as visualized in F₀ contours much more easily visible to the naked eye than in F₀ contours for short DPs. This is because of the large drop in F₀ range due to a downtrend in F₀ before the site of the H-, which is much larger over the course of long DPs under discussion here, than over the short DPs in Figure 1.

Table 1

Structured elicitation for extremely long DPs: A fully crossed 2 × 2 design for WORD ORDER (default, scrambled) × TRANSITIVITY (transitive, intransitive). The segmental strings X and Y are given in (3).

SENTENCE STRUCTURE	WORD ORDER
	default	scrambled
transitive	Verb [e X]erg [Y]abs	Verb [X]abs [e Y]erg
intransitive	Verb [X]abs [i Y]obl	Verb [i X]obl [Y]abs

1. (3)

1. Template for constructing verb-initial sentences with extremely long DPs (case markers not shown here, but are shown in Table 1)

1.  

1. na ‘PAST’ Verb [X] [Y], where: Verb ∈ {laŋona ‘hear,’ manoŋi ‘be smelly’}

1.  
1. X =

1. le
2. DET.SG
1. liona
2. lion
1. a
2. GEN
1. le
2. DET.SG
1. milionea
2. millionaire
1. leaŋa
2. bad
1. mai
2. DIR
1. ierusalema
2. Jerusalem
1. i
2. OBL
1. luŋa
2. on
1. o
2. GEN
1. le
2. DET.SG
1. mamanu
2. design
1. ‘the lion of the bad millionaire from Jerusalem on the design’

1.  
1. Y =

1. le
2. DET.SG
1. manu-lele
2. animal-fly
1. a
2. GEN
1. le
2. DET.SG
1. malini
2. marine
1. maːnaia
2. nice
1. mai
2. DIR
1. Apia
2. Apia
1. ‘the bird of the nice marine from Apia’

Keeping the DPs constant, we manipulated (a) TRANSITIVITY to be either transitive (with the transitive verb [laŋona]) or intransitive (with the intransitive verb [manoŋi], and (b) the WORD ORDER to be default (VSO/V-S-PP) or scrambled (VOS/V-PP-S). These manipulations are summarized in Table 1.

If the appearance of a high tone were being governed by prosodic restrictions on eurythmy to break the sentence into roughly equal halves, we might expect a high edge tone to appear between the two DPs in the sentence, regardless of word order or transitivity. However, Figure 3 shows that this is not the case in representative F₀ tracks from a single speaker who uttered the sentences without discernable silent pauses.¹¹ There are many peaks in the F₀ contour from LH* pitch accents over content words, but we annotate the F₀ contour only at the site between the two DPs to highlight what is happening at this point (see on-line supplementary material for more detailed annotations of these F₀ contours; link given at the beginning of Section 1.1).¹² We found a sentence-medial H- for the VSO transitive condition (Figure 3a), as well as for the V-PP-S intransitive condition (Figure 3d). However, no sentence-medial H- between the two DPs occurred in the other two conditions, so the generalization for the distribution of the H- cannot be that it occurs before the second post-verbal argument. Rather, an H- appeared between DPs only when the second DP was an absolutive argument.¹³

Figure 3

F₀ contours for extremely long DPs in (3). An absolutive H- occurs on the right edge of the first DP: (a) In a transitive clause with VSO order, and (d) in an intransitive clause with V-PP-S order. No H- occurs on the right edge of the first DP in (b), which is a transitive clause with VOS order, or in (c), which is an intransitive clause with V-PP-S order.

2.3 Evidence for insensitivity of the absolutive high to speech rate

Having presented evidence that the presence of the absolutive high is insensitive to prosodic length/size, we now provide evidence to show that it is also insensitive to speech rate. As a baseline for comparison, consider the classic example of sensitivity of prosodic phrasing to speech rate in this example from Calcutta Bengali (Hayes & Lahiri, 1991 [54a]), where parentheses delimit ‘phonological phrases.’¹⁵ (Another example is Fougeron & Jun, 1998 on French).

In Calcutta Bengali, phonological phrases are produced with rising pitch contours, with a L* pitch accent at the left edge and a high edge tone at the right edge. Therefore, the fact that phrasing in Calcutta Bengali is acutely sensitive to speech rate, means that so too is the placement of the L* and high edge tones: The loss of phonological phrase boundaries in faster speech entails the loss of L* and high edge tones. We will see, however, that the presence and placement of H- tones does not vary with speech rate in the Samoan data set presented in this section (although—unsurprisingly—the phonetic realization of H- tones is sensitive to speech rate).

We elicited simple transitive and intransitive sentences, varying the number of syllables between the absolutive high and neighboring primary stress (to observe the effect of tonal crowding on the realization of the H- for another study; tonal crowding occurs when there is close spacing between neighboring tonal events), and asked our primary consultant to read them at a comfortable pace, and then a fast pace, and a slow pace (see on-line supplementary materials for more information on speech rate under these different conditions).¹⁶ A sample minimal pair in the data set—a transitive sentence and its intransitive counterpart—is shown in (6). For a full description of the elicited sentences, see Appendix A.1. One thing to note about the sentences is that since they were also designed to test the effect of tonal crowding on the realization of the H-, there were a number of sentences where the absolutive argument was initially stressed and/or vowel-initial. In such sentences, it appears that there is a compromise between the conflicting demands of realizing the high target of the H- and the low target of the immediately following LH* pitch accent on the stressed syllable, so that F₀ contours on the last syllable immediately preceding the absolutive (i.e., in the third syllable, S3) can be seen to fall slightly in Figure 4, which compares F₀ contours between absolutive and ergative subjects and objects. The H- is nevertheless present and positioned before the absolutive as expected.

Figure 4

Comparison of mean F₀ contours over 3-syllable subjects and objects under slow, normal, and fast speech rates for sentences like (6). Vertical lines delimit syllable boundaries between the first (S1), second (S2), and third (S3) syllables of the subject or object. The absolutive high remains present under different speech rate conditions for the 3-syllable absolutive subject [malini] ‘marine’ (a, b, c), and the 3-syllable absolutive object [liona] ‘lion’ (d).

Each transitive sentence like (6a) had a minimally different intransitive counterpart like (6b). This allowed us to compare F₀ tracks over the subject when it was followed by the absolutive (6a) to when it was followed by an oblique (6b). These comparisons are shown for the subject in Figure 4a, b, c for the three different speech rates; Figure 4d compares F₀ tracks over the object when it is absolutive vs. oblique under the fast speech rate. Figure 4a, b, c, show F₀ contours for utterances where the subject was [malini], and Figure 4d shows F₀ contours for utterances where the object was [liona].

There are two sites where we expected an absolutive high to appear: (i) Immediately preceding an absolutive subject and into the left edge of the subject in the first syllable (S1) in Figure 4a, b, c, and (ii) immediately preceding the absolutive object, at the right edge of the subject (in the third syllable, S3) in Figure 4a, b, c, as well as at the left edge of the absolutive object (in S1) in Figure 4d. One distinguishing property of the absolutive high’s F₀ contour is clearly consistent across speech rates: The persistence of high F₀ into the first syllable of the absolutive. This is apparent in syllable 1 (S1) for the absolutive subject for all three speech rates: In Figure 4a, b, c—the solid black line (the intransitive F₀ contour) stays well above the dotted grey line (the transitive F₀ contour). Speech rate does induce allophonic variability in the realization of the absolutive high, though. In the slow and normal speech rates, there is clearly a continued rise and maintenance of high F₀ in the F₀ contour into the third syllable in transitive sentences, when the subject is followed by an absolutive object. In the fast speech rate, though, the F₀ height in the third syllable (S3) is similar for the ergative and absolutive subjects, so the phonetic difference when the absolutive H- is present or not before the object is smaller. Still, even in this fast speech rate, Figure 4d shows that the high F₀ from the absolutive H- persists into the first syllable (S1) of the absolutive object so that the shape of the F₀ curve when the object is absolutive is clearly distinct from the F₀ curve when the object is oblique.

In summary, the absolutive H- did not disappear as speech rate increased—in this sense, the presence of the absolutive high is not sensitive to speech rate, although (unsurprisingly) the particular phonetic realization of the absolutive high is. The insensitivity of the presence and placement of the Samoan absolutive H- to speech rate thus contrasts with the sensitivity of the presence of L* and high edge tones in Calcutta Bengali to speech rate.

2.4 Evidence for insensitivity of the absolutive high to register

The last factor that we’ll show does not influence the presence of the absolutive H- is ‘register.’ Samoan is well-known for having two distinct registers: Tautala lelei ‘good language’—used in literary contexts and and Westernized institutional contexts like in church and school, as well as with foreigners, and tautala leaga ‘bad language’—used in traditional ceremonies and meetings, as well as between family members and between friends (Shore, 1977, 1980; Duranti, 1981, p. 165–168; Ochs, 1988, p. 196; Duranti, 1990, p. 4–5; Mosel & Hovdhaugen, 1992, p. 7–11; Mayer, 2001).¹⁷ One of the most striking contrasts between the two registers is in the segmental phonology. The following mergers occur from tautala lelei to tautala leaga (Mosel & Hovdhaugen, 1992, p. 9):

Consideration of the syntax-prosody interface in tautala leaga is important for two reasons. First, although almost all linguistic research on Samoan has been in tautala lelei, “as much as 90% of casual speech and most traditional oration actually take place using more colloquial forms of Samoan” (i.e., in tautala leaga) (Mayer, 2001, p. 58). Secondly, the segmental ergative case marker e has been reported to be rarely used in tautala leaga (Mosel & Hovdhaugen, 1992, p. 9), see also Mayer (2001). Mayer (2001) also reports that genitive case markers are often dropped in tautala leaga as well (Duranti, 1981; Ochs, 1988), although the literature does not indicate whether the oblique particle i is also typically dropped or not. In contexts where segmental case markers are dropped, the presence of a tone marking absolutive case would not only be informative about morphosyntactic structure, but it would serve to disambiguate between possible parses.

Consider the tautala leaga minimal pair in (8). The two sentences are string-identical, but if there were a high tone before [le malie], ‘the shark’ in (8a), in contrast to a high tone before [le liona], ‘the lion’ in (8b), then the position of the high tone would disambiguate between VSO and VOS word order.

We present initial evidence that the absolutive high is present in tautala leaga from two data sets. In the first data set, sentences in tautala leaga were elicited from our primary consultant in Los Angeles. Twenty-four minimal pairs from two transitive verbs ([laˈŋoŋa] ‘hear,’ [iˈloa] ‘know’), two intransitive verbs ([mˈaŋoŋi] ‘be smelly/fragrant,’ [laˈvea] ‘be injured by’), and four different animal NPs, [liˈoŋa] ‘lion,’ [koˈloa] ‘duck,’ [iˈsumu] ‘rat,’¹⁸ and [maˈlie] ‘shark.’ Within each minimal pair, the only variable we manipulated was WORD ORDER: VSO vs. VOS, see (9) and (10). This consultant found both word orders licit out-of-the-blue. No segmental case markers were present for ergative or oblique case; therefore, each string was ambiguous for whether the subject was the first or second argument. However, for the purposes of elicitation, the case markers were indicated in parentheses. Each of the 48 sentences (in randomized order) was uttered twice, for a total of 96 utterances.

As shown in Figure 5, the absence of segmental case markers had no effect on the presence of the absolutive H-: The H- appears in the third syllable on the right edge of the verb (Figure 5a) and in the third syllable on the right edge of the first argument (Figure 5b) when they are immediately followed by an absolutive argument. Like in the F₀ contours from other data sets in the paper, the absolutive H- is also still clearly discernable on the F₀ contour over the first syllable of the absolutive argument (Figure 5b).

Figure 5

F₀ contours when no segmental case markers are present for sentences like (9) and (10). An absolutive H- appears when an absolutive argument immediately follows: (a) The verbs ([laˈŋoŋa] ‘hear,’ [maˈŋoŋi] ‘smelly’), and (b) the first argument in the sentence ([liˈoŋa] ‘lion,’ [iˈsumu] ‘rat’) in (b). The jump in the F₀ contours over syllable 2 in (b) is due to segmental perturbation of the F₀ contour by the voiceless fricative [s] in [isumu].

The second data set we elicited in tautala leaga is described in detail in Appendix A.3. This consisted of two consultants’ most preferred responses to a variety of questions eliciting different focus conditions in the tautala lelei data set described in Appendix A.2, elicited in tautala leaga for Speakers f03 and f05. Briefly, the tautala lelei data set included question-answer pairs over a range of focus conditions (broad focus, wh subject focus, corrective subject focus, wh object/PP focus, corrective object/PP focus) and answer types (VSO, VOS, fronted subject, fronted object), for both transitives and intransitives. As discussed later in Section 6 and shown in Tables 5 and 6, a high tone still invariably occurred before absolutives in the tautala leaga data set. It should be noted that f03 explicitly stated she was dropping the ergative e in the tautala leaga recordings, but f05 did not say that. Therefore, it’s possible that some trace of the ergative e, however reduced, might have been present in f05’s speech (so that prosody wasn’t the only means of detecting case)—this is something we leave to future fine-grained phonetic analysis to check.

In this section, we presented a preliminary view of the Samoan syntax-prosody interface (to be revised) where the syntax determines the presence of the high tone as an absolutive case marker (and only as an absolutive case marker), so that the moment that a parser detects a high tone, it can conclude that an absolutive argument is about to occur. In the following section, we set up a syntactic perspective to define the absolutive high in the syntax/prosody interface.

5.1 The coordinators are H- marked

For coordination, we can either assume that the high tone is lexically associated with the coordinators, or we can again introduce it postsyntactically, in spellout. Consider the following examples:

If we assume that the marking is done in spellout, then the coordinator just needs to trigger the insertion. Note that case marking will apply to these structures as well, inserting the absolutive H-, yielding a structure that we can assume to be roughly like this:

Here we follow Zhang (2009) in assuming that the coordinator ‘inherits’ the category of its arguments, D in this example (additional detail in Appendix B).

5.2 Fronted arguments are H- marked

As illustrated by the first tone indicated in (19), fronted arguments are H- marked:

The spellout rule we need here simply inserts a high as a reflex of the syntactic configuration causing the material to be fronted. Case marking applies in this example too, inserting the absolutive case marker H- before le mamanu ‘the design,’ so we can obtain a structure like this:

In (20), our spellout rule has adjoined the H- to C, but if it turned out that we had evidence for an alternate structure, e.g., right-adjoining the H- to the fronted DP, we could revise the spellout rule accordingly.

With these additional spellout rules, other prosodic events besides the absolutive H- are determined by the syntax. See Section 7 and Appendix B for a sketch of one way to execute these proposals.

6.1 The tautala lelei ‘good language’ data set

As described in Section 2.4, this data set included question-answer pairs over a range of focus conditions (broad focus, wh subject focus, corrective subject focus, wh object/PP focus, corrective object/PP focus) and answer types (VSO, VOS, fronted subject, fronted object), for both transitives and intransitives (see Appendix A.2 and Yu, 2017 for more details). Speaker f03’s data set included only inanimate objects (due to time constraints) and so is smaller than speaker f05’s data, which also included animate objects. The frequency of tonal events for different morphosyntactic structures is given in Table 3 for Speaker f03 and in Table 4 for Speaker f05. The syntactic environments include those where a site for a syntactically conditioned H- is expected (absolutive, fronting), as well as environments where edge tones were transcribed but no syntactically-conditioned H- is expected (immediately preceding ergative or oblique nominals). In all tables of frequencies given in this paper, the listing of tonal events is exhaustive, i.e., there are no edge tones we transcribed that we do not include in the tables. A tone label with a “?” means that there was some evidence for that particular tone, but we were not certain that it was present. A tone label like “L-, pause” means that the tone was followed by a period of silence. Tonal events indicated for “oblique” structures are tonal events that occurred immediately preceding oblique PPs.

For speaker f03, there were 60 sites for absolutives, and a high tone appeared in 59 of them (98%); a low tone appeared once: In a VOS response to corrective focus on the object. Immediately preceding the ergative, an L tone followed by an audible pause occurred 11 times in fronted object constructions and 7 times in VOS sentences in a range of discourse contexts: Broad focus, wh-focus on the VP, subject, and corrective focus on the subject and object. Immediately preceding the oblique, an L tone with a pause occurred under wh-VP, wh-object, corrective-object, and corrective-subject focus conditions, all in VSO order. In fronting, an L- tone appeared twice in fronted subject responses to wh-subject focus.

For speaker f05, there were two cases of L- tones before an absolutive: Once for corrective focus on the subject for a VSO response, and once for wh-subject on the focus for a fronted subject response. Preceding an ergative, a L- tone with a pause occurred 3 times for fronted object responses, for wh-focus on the VP and on the object, and for corrective focus on the object. An L- tone with a pause occurred twice before obliques, for wh-focus on the object, with VSO responses. In fronting, an L- tone appeared 15 times (2/3 of these with pauses), occurring in both fronted subject and object responses to wh- or corrective focus on the object or subject.

6.2 The tautala leaga ‘bad language’ data set

This data set was introduced in Section 2.4 and is described in detail in Appendix A.3. Recall that it consisted of f03 and f05’s preferred responses to the various dicourse contexts, elicited in tautala leaga. The frequency of tonal events for different morphosyntactic structures is given in Table 5 for Speaker f03 and in Table 6 for Speaker f05.

For speaker f03, there were two H- tones before an ergative, in two repetitions of a fronted object response to corrective focus on the object. Three different tonal events occurred before the oblique in VSO responses to corrective focus on the object.

For speaker f05, no tonal events occurred before ergatives or obliques, and H- tones always appeared for absolutives and in fronting.

6.3 The basic coordination data set

This data set, which included a range of nominal and verbal phrase conjunction and disjunction, was already introduced in Section 4 and is described in detail in Appendix A.4. The frequency of tonal events for different morphosyntactic structures for Speaker f03 is given in Table 7.

An L- tone with a pause occurred before the ergative in two repetitions of a verbal disjunction. L- tones occurred in conjunctions and disjunctions of DPs in transitive and intransitive sentences and also in verbal conjunction and disjunction. Before obliques, an L- tone or suspected L- tone sometimes occurred in both conjunction and disjunction of DPs.

6.4 The prepenultimate stress data set

This data set was already introduced in Section 4 and is described in detail in Appendix A.5. Recall that this data set manipulated stress position in a target word by including English proper names and probed the interaction of different morphosyntactic high tones with stress position. The frequency of tonal events for different morphosyntactic structures is given in Table 8 for Speaker f03 and in Table 9 for Speaker f05.

For speaker f03, this data set was noisy because she had some trouble with the English name Gabrielle. All unexpected tonal events for the absolutive happened in utterances with this name. An L- tone with a pause occurred in disjunction for two repetitions of DP disjunction. Before obliques, an L- tone with a pause occurred in sentences with ditransitives and conjunctions of absolutive subjects, and a H- tone with a pause occurred in two repetitions of a ditransitive. Although it’s possible that some of the pauses were disfluent rather than fluent, we didn’t discard any of the utterances because there was no evidence besides pauses (such as speech repairs) that a disfluency might have occurred.

For speaker f05, L- tones only occurred in disjunctions in the data set. The coordination H- was missing in two repetitions of a particular ditransitive (but not other repetitions).

6.5 Summary and discussion

There are a few generalizations we draw from these exploratory data sets to revise our picture of the Samoan syntax-prosody interface. While the invariance in morphosyntactic conditioning of the high tone by the absolutive, coordination, and fronting was largely upheld by the frequency counts, there are two classes of exceptions that complicate the picture.

First, there were sporadic instances where the absolutive high and coordination high did not appear, and there were also sporadic instances where a high tone appeared before the ergative or obliques. Presently, we can point to no systematic factor underlying these exceptions: In general, we would certainly expect such exceptions, due to disfluencies and speech errors or other production planning factors. Until we better understand what factors may be driving these exceptions, we can treat them as noise and model these exceptions by having a probability distribution placing some probability mass on no tone or a high edge tone occurring in all the morphosyntactic structures we have discussed.

Second, there were occurrences of an L-/L% that ‘overrode’ the H- tone. This happened only twice for absolutives, out of a total of 467 times (0.04%), but it happened more frequently in coordination (15/185, 8%) and in fronting (16/134, 12%). An L- also sometimes occurred before ergatives (25/237, 11%) and obliques (34/314, 11%), where we would not expect an H-. Tentatively we note that there may be some systematic conditioning of discourse structure in play for the appearance of the L-; it mostly appeared under wh- or corrective focus; in part this was because fronted object or subject constructions were mostly accepted by consultants only under wh- or corrective focus. In addition, word order may play a role in conditioning the presence of the L-: In f03’s tautala lelei data set, an L- followed by an audible pause preceded the ergative occurred 11 times in fronted object constructions and 7 times in VOS sentences, and in no other constructions.

Finally, for both H- and L- tones, another observation we made was that sometimes they were followed by a silent pause, e.g., the L- (L%) in Figure 9a. At the present time, we do not yet have enough data to understand if there are systematic differences between the distribution of edge tones followed by an audible pause and those that are not, or how multiple edge tones from a variety of grammatical sources might interact when appearing at a single edge, or if a single edge tone might simultaneously come from multiple grammatical sources. Calhoun (2017) makes a valuable contribution here, showing that the appearance of both low and high sentence-medial edge tones is quite common, though variable, in sentences with ‘exclusive’ [naʔo] constructions and ‘equative’ copular constructions. While the majority of her figures of representative intonational transcriptions show edge tones followed by (often quite long) silent pauses, the transcriptional count data given doesn’t distinguish between whether these edge tones are followed by pauses or not.

As mentioned in Section 4, in intonational phonology, the presence of a pause is often taken to be grounds to distinguish between types of edge tones, such as between an intonational phrase and prosodic categories lower in the prosodic hierarchy. It would be interesting if the optional edge tones that occur in Calhoun’s (2017) constructions before the predicate and between arguments in equatives are typically followed by pauses, since the H- tones we’ve discussed here for absolutives, coordination, and fronting invariably appear and are typically not followed by pauses. Such a systematic distinction might suggest that variably appearing edge tones typically followed by pauses have a different grammatical source, e.g., prosodic grammar, than those that are not, e.g., syntactic grammar, and that, accordingly, we would want to handle them differently in production and comprehension models.

There is no reason not to have an interface model that includes both syntactically determined tones inserted in spellout as well as prosodically determined ones. The emphasis in much of work on the syntax-phonology interface is on the relation between syntactic and prosodic constituency, and this may sometimes make it seem like this relation is the whole of the syntax-phonology interface. But that is not the case, as stated in the opening sentence of Selkirk’s statement of the ‘Match theory’ of syntax-prosody mapping: “The topic of the syntax-phonology interface is broad, encompassing different submodules of grammar and interactions of these. This chapter addresses one fundamental aspect of the syntax-phonology interface in detail: The relation between syntactic constituency and the prosodic constituent domains for sentence-level phonological and phonetic phenomena. Two further core aspects, which rely on an understanding of the first, are not examined here – the phonological realization (spell-out) of the morphosyntactic feature bundles of morphemes and lexical items that form part of syntactic representation and the linearization of syntactic representation which produces the surface word order of the sentence as actually pronounced” (E. Selkirk, 2011, p. 435).

We have come to the end of the presentation of our empirical data bearing on the syntax-prosody interface in Samoan. We first presented evidence showing that the presence of high edge tones in the structural configuration of ‘absolutive’ case is insensitive to extra-syntactic factors (Section 2). Then, we introduced coordination and fronted expressions as additional configurations triggering high edge tones (Section 4). With this final section, we have pointed out occasional exceptions to the expected distribution of syntactically-conditioned H- tones, and we’ve hypothesized that some high and low edge tones might be prosodically rather than syntactically conditioned, see Yu (2017) for further discussion. Section 7.1 notes that the class of parsing models we are considering can be extended to be probabilistic to handle variability in the appearance of syntactically conditioned edge tones discussed here (see Appendix B for further detail). We also discussed the possibility of an additional class of variably occurring edge tones in Samoan which may be conditioned on prosodic domains. The model defined in this paper factors out the syntactically determined portion of the interface in Samoan, and we leave extending the model to handle prosodically-conditioned edge tones to future work.

7.1 Minimalist grammar and parsing for Samoan syntax

In this section, we do not aim to present a complete minimalist grammar (MG) for Samoan, but just to defend the view that minimalist grammars have the mechanisms required to define syntactic structures like those shown in previous sections for ‘absolutive’ case, coordination and fronted expressions. Our characterization of the relevant aspects of Samoan is facilitated by the fact that we follow the proposals of Collins mentioned above.²⁷ Collins proposes that the basic Samoan VSO order is derived by VP fronting, after the arguments have raised out of the VP, as indicated in the syntactic structures shown above. He suggests that after v selects VP, v has an EPP feature which triggers the raising of all arguments. That is, the EPP feature of v should trigger the raising of the object, if there is an object, and not crash if there is no object. Since the number of arguments of any verb in the lexicon is bounded, an EPP feature of that kind could be added to MGs without fundamentally changing their computational properties, but the same structures can be built by assigning each argument a different feature and triggering the movements of the phrases with each feature.²⁸ When T is merged, an EPP feature on T can then trigger the fronting of VP to its specifier. And then when C is merged, the head of T moves to C.

Consider again the syntactic structure (11a), repeated below on the left. It can be calculated by merging the lexical items as shown in the derivation on the right. In that 10-step derivation, the features of the lexical items determine the internal merge steps indicated by • and the two external merge (i.e., movement) steps indicated by ⚬, corresponding to the coindexed trace t(0) and DP(0) and the coindexed trace t(1) and VP(1), in the tree on the left (details are provided in Appendix B).

So the basic mechanisms that Collins uses to get basic clause structures are either immediately available in the MG framework or easily emulated and added. The reason that it is interesting that MGs can encode these analyses is not because that tells us anything new about Samoan syntax per se, but rather because that guarantees certain computational properties, including the proven existence of a range of parsing strategies adequate to compute all and only the structures allowed by the grammar (Harkema, 2000, 2001; Stabler, 2013). Those algorithms are efficient and also easily extend to select analyses which are ‘most probable’ in various senses (Hunter & Dyer, 2013). Thus, they can encode the probabilistic modeling to handle some of the variability that we described in Section 6–variability in the appearance of syntactically determined high edge tones that we treat as ‘noise.’

MGs have also been extended to handle a range of coordinate structures (Torr & Stabler, 2016), respecting the ‘coordinate structure constraint’ (CSC) and ‘across the board’ extractions. Roughly, constituents that differ in what has been extracted from them cannot coordinate, and this is easily enforced in MGs by reflecting the relevant properties of extracted elements in the category (i.e., the features) of the coordinated elements. Some examples of coordination are considered in Section 4, and a wider range is discussed by Collins (2016, Section 6). Collins observes that the CSC correctly predicts the degraded status of structures that coordinate unergative and unaccusative predicates in Samoan, exactly as in the English gloss:

While the properties of these constructions are not fully understood in either English or Samoan, it appears that CSC applies similarly. And for present concerns, the only relevant question is how to specify that the coordinators are H- marked. Appendix B shows how MGs can also handle fronted expressions.

The reason for drawing attention to the derivation shown in (23) on the right is that it is especially simple, in the sense that it is defined by a simple finite state mechanism (Michaelis, 1998; Kobele et al., 2007). Not only is this particular tree simple in that sense, but the derivation trees are guaranteed to be finite state definable no matter how the minimalist grammar needs to be elaborated to get the whole Samoan language. This sets the stage for a simple approach to spellout.

7.2 Spellout, variability, and parsing for Samoan

The preceding section showed that the syntactic structures proposed in this paper are all MG-definable. What about the tone-marking spellout rules? Formal grammars and parsing algorithms are usually defined over a lexicon. In linguistic theory and in applications, the lexicon is often taken to correspond to pronounced words or morphemes; derivations concatenate the pronounced elements. Many grammars in the minimalist tradition depart quite dramatically from that perspective though. Not only do they allow phonologically empty lexical items of various categories, phonologically vacuous (‘covert’) movements, etc., but also processes that distance the basic formatives of the syntax quite significantly from what is actually heard or spoken. In this recent tradition, the syntax is stated over feature structures that are significantly more abstract than the ‘pronounced words’ of traditional approaches. A wide range of theoretical traditions is advancing this kind of idea—that not only does phonology modify pronounced sequences in regular ways, but also, ‘distributed morphology,’ ‘exoskeletal morphology,’ etc. rearrange elements to allow more abstract syntactic formatives. The proposal in this paper falls into this very broad tradition. The proposal is that Samoan structural ‘case marking,’ and the similar marking of fronted and coordinate expressions, is not the concatenation of special lexical items, but is ‘postsyntactic,’ a kind of pronounced reflex of structural configurations.²⁹ Because the tone-marking rules are sensitive to syntactic structure, they cannot apply before any assumptions about syntactic structure, but the idea that, in performance models, they apply after parsing the syntax is unappealing, and, it turns out, unnecessary. They can apply simultaneously.

To show this, we first establish that the case-marking and other tone-insertions needed for this approach are themselves simple in the sense of being ‘regular,’ that is, finite state definable on trees, in a precise sense that matters for the computation of the syntax/prosody interface. In the trees just above in (23), notice that when the leaves of the tree on the left are pronounced in order, we have the example (2a) on page 5, without the case marking—this is the standard spellout rule. Because the derivations are finite state definable, we can use another finite state mechanism to, in effect, climb up the tree and insert the case markers wherever a case marking configuration occurs. So for example, to get tautala lelei case marking we insert the elements shown here:

Spelling this out, the case markers are pronounced in the correct, structurally determined positions.

In previous sections we have seen H- insertion in the structural configuration of ‘absolutive’ (which we are taking to be nom, acc) case assignment in (11), in coordination (18), and in fronted expressions (20). The previous section argues that these constructions can be defined by minimalist grammars. Now we add the observation that all of the tone placement rules needed for these constructions are simple in the precise sense of being, quite easily, finite state definable. Minimalist grammars have very simple derivations, so we can specify the case-marking and other tone-insertions as a simple reflex of the structures of minimalist derivations.

Finally, it is fairly easy to see now that the case marking and structure calculation can be done simultaneously. This solves the puzzle of (22), showing how we can straightforwardly define a comprehension model for Samoan from the production-oriented grammatical components that we already previously defined. Observe that (i) the structural configurations in which these changes apply are defined ‘locally’—by the features of the two subtrees that appear at the point where the marking is to take place; and (ii) the marks which are inserted are simple constants, not full phrases of any kind, and not copies of other structures, or any such thing. Because of property (i), we can define a ‘parsing grammar’ that combines the syntax and spellout, distinguishing the categories relevant for case marking right, and so that in this combined system, a rule applies to insert the specified constants mentioned in property (ii). In this sense, the post-syntactic process can be ‘composed into’ the syntax in a way that yields another grammar that is, in computational respects, a grammar of the same kind, a minimalist grammar. This situation will hold not only for the superficial syntax sketched here, but it holds for any minimalist grammar, no matter how complicated, and any post-syntactic process with properties (i–ii). Therefore, we need not suppose that a parser considers segmental material only, subject to a following filter based on prosody. Rather, prosodic and segmental cues can be considered together, as soon as they are perceived. And since this is a standard MG, some of the variability can be handled with a probabilistic model, as mentioned at the end of Section 7.1.

8.1 Strategic principle 1: Finding cases where prosodic events are primarily under syntactic control

The crucial property of the Samoan syntax/prosody interface that makes it a good first case study is that it provides clear cases of prosodic events that are under the control of the syntax. We have shown that the prosodic events studied here do not disappear in short or long constituents, changes of speech rate, or changes of speech register; even the dramatic change from tautala lelei to tautala leaga preserves H- marking. Nevertheless, with small probabilities, the tonal events can surface in different ways or fail to surface, and so we have offered up a probabilistic parsing model to handle these exceptions until we better understand all the factors in play. Even with the evidenced nondeterminacy, we have seen that certain tonal events in Samoan are nevertheless very good signals of syntactic structure, and we have described fairly well-understood and flexible methods for modeling these in efficient parsing mechanisms.

It is unlikely that the primacy of syntactic conditioning in the Samoan syntax/prosody interface is anomalous in natural language. There are two ways to locate other such cases. One is for us to continue to expand our range of knowledge about the syntax/prosody interface cross-linguistically in prosodic fieldwork. As a case in point, a striking recent addition to the catalogue of syntactically determined prosody in natural language comes from the Dogon languages of Mali. In the Dogon language of Tommo So, the word for ‘cat,’ gamma bears an HH tone sequence in isolation; gamma bears the same HH sequence in ‘three cats’ and ‘the cat.’ But in the nominal phrases ‘black cat,’ ‘one cat,’ ‘Sana’s cat,’ gamma surfaces with an LL sequence (Heath & McPherson, 2013; McPherson & Heath, 2016). Heath and McPherson (2013); McPherson and Heath (2016) discovered that what tone sequence gamma and other words surface with is completely predictable and insensitive to prosodic factors; for instance, the tone sequences over nominal phrases are completely determined by the syntactic category of ‘controller’ words within the nominal phrase that c-command the other words in the nominal phrase.

The second strategy for uncovering clear cases of prosodic events that are under the control of the syntax is to examine well-studied phenomena and reconsider the assumptions under which they have been analyzed. Since theories of the syntax/prosody interface must make assumptions about syntax and phonology, in addition to what information is passed between them, their ability to fit the data rests on all of these assumptions together. Thus, re-examining assumptions about any component of an interface model can reveal that what has appeared to be poorly understood variability in prosodic events is perhaps in fact a regular consequence of previously unrecognized factors. As an example, Hirsch and Wagner (2015) found that they could reconcile conflicting pattern of results for the prosodification of prepositional phrase attachment in English, e.g., Tap the frog with the flower on the hat, with a syntactic analysis. Snedeker and Trueswell (2003) found that speakers prosodically disambiguated only when disambiguation was needed for the visual scene, but Kraljic and Brennan (2005) found that speakers prosodically disambiguated even if there was disambiguating referential context and they were unaware of the ambiguity. Hirsch and Wagner (2015) found they could account for the conflicting results by noticing syntactic differences between the two sets of experimental stimuli: Snedeker and Trueswell’s (2003) stimuli contrasted left vs. list bracketing, while Kraljic and Brennan’s (2005) stimuli contrasted left- vs. right-bracketing. Another example of work re-examining syntactic assumptions in an interface model is Ahn (2016a), which shows how hierarchical syntactic structure might regularly condition apparent exceptions to the nuclear stress rule in English.

8.2 Strategic principle 2: Testing hypotheses with computational models of the interface

Strategic principle 1 lays the empirical groundwork to motivate production models of the interface for syntactic parsing. The composability of MGs and related finite state systems mentioned in Section 7 and Appendix B makes them an advantageous choice for defining and comparing production models. On the one hand, we can define each component of the interface separately and thus factorize the interacting influences on prosody. On the other hand, these different components can also then be folded in together for comprehension models. Although MGs and finite state interfaces can accommodate a wide range of proposals, they have empirical consequences, some of which are contested. For instance, MGs don’t allow an unbounded number of elements to move to the front of a clause, e.g., MGs cannot express multiple wh-movement with no finite bounds. If we were to compose in a finite state prosodic grammar as part of the interface computation, this would also be restricted. If prosodic events were conditioned on the number of brackets there are at a boundary (and a potentially unbounded number of them), e.g., Wagner (2005, 2010), there would be no way to encode prosody in the grammar: Regular grammars cannot express unlimited sensitivity to the number of brackets. Encoding syntactic and phonological generalizations in MG and related formalisms also forces us to be completely clear about what our account of the empirical facts is—including points we aren’t yet sure of, where we must adopt tentative, likely simplifed assumptions as a starting point. That is, formalizing our accounts computationally lays all our assumptions bare, and is not an endpoint following fieldwork; but an intermediate step in the iterative process cycling between proposing and refining testable hypotheses.

Our current understanding of the conditioning of high edge tones led us to define the computation of the interface in terms of post-syntactic spellout rules that place H- tones in particular syntactic configurations. Stating these rules, and the syntactic grammar they are sensitive to, clarified what we were claiming the ‘absolutive high’ actually is, as we explained in Section 3. But if new data revealed a more general syntactic configuration underlying the H- tones in Samoan, e.g., if every adjoined phrase were marked with an H-, that could also be represented in a minimalist grammar, composed into the syntax; the proposal here does not hang on a particular, precise account of the syntactic conditioning of H-. It could also be informative to formalize interface theories that refer to syntactic phases, e.g., see Ahn (2016b); Dobashi (2004); Kratzer and Selkirk (2007); Dobashi (2009); Cheng and Downing (2016).

If it turns out that ‘information structure’ determines the placement of some H- tones in Samoan, then if these principles are encoded in syntactic structure (e.g., Cheng & Downing, 2009; Kavari et al., 2012), it would require assessing how it could be implemented. Given a precise syntactic account of the view of information structure described in Calhoun (2017), and assuming that the generalizations stated there fit the data, we would assess if we could encode her proposed generalization: That H- tones occur at the edges of incomplete information units because phonological phrases map onto theme and rheme units. In that case, we would also want to revise the prosodic grammar involved in the computation of the Samoan interface to deriving prosodic trees, rather than comprising just some simple rules for inserting tones into syntactic trees. As we speculated in Section 6.5, it may be that there are prosodically- as well as syntactically-conditioned H- tones, in which case we would want our prosodic grammar to include the tone insertion rules, as well as derive prosodic trees.

These are all examples of how empirical work might drive revisions of the computational models. But computational modeling can also drive empirical work, based on what it tells us about broad classes of assumptions about the interface. The proposal for the computation of the Samoan interface in this paper, for instance, tells us something about the broad class of interface theories in which the prosodic grammar does not derive prosodic trees. As we have discussed, it is not obvious that a reasonable comprehension model could be defined for such prosodic grammars. In this paper, however, we have shown that such grammars are in fact compatible with a large range of minimalist parsing models. Thus, the lack of a reasonable comprehension model would not be grounds for rejecting interface theories that exclude prosodic hierarchical structure. Our proposal also shows that we can straightforwardly compute the syntax/prosody interface, even if we assume high edge tones which might overlap significantly in phonetic realization actually arise from different sources, rather than a single unified source in the grammar.

The fine-grained model of the interface we have proposed here—with tones placed by individual rules that refer to specific morphosyntactic constructions—is quite different from other theories of the syntax-phonology interface.³⁰ As stated in Kaisse and Zwicky (1987, p. 7), both theories that have proposed ‘direct reference’ to syntax and those that have proposed ‘indirect reference’ to syntax have agreed that phonological rules refer to cross-categorical relationships rather than specific syntactic categories. For example, Odden (1987) describes five rules of shortening for Kimatuumbi in NPs, VPs, PPs, APs, and PossPs, and then unifies these by saying that shortening applies to the head of a phrase. But it is not clear that a model that hides syntactic structure—whether by restricting what aspects of syntax are visible, or by the introduction of mediating prosodic structure—could fit our current empirical evidence in Samoan better than the fine-grained model we have proposed. We do not find high tones in Samoan for all heads or all phrases—for instance, we would need to explain the asymmetry in the presence of the high tone for absolutives vs. the absence of high tones for ergatives. A fine-grained account that fits the data well sets a challenge—the attempts at deeper or more unified accounts should aim to fit the data as well.