Mesoamerica

The Mesoamerican linguistic area is rich with prosodic phenomena, including a wide variety of complex tone, phonation, stress, and intonational systems. The diversity of prosodic patterns in Mesoamerica reflects the extreme time-depth and complex history of the languages spoken there. This chapter surveys the prosody of Mesoamerican languages and some past analyses of their structures. Topics include the areal distribution of tonal complexity; interactions between stress, tone, and segmental contrasts; the phonetics of tone and phonation; metrical structure; and higher-level prosodic phenomena. Case studies from different languages also highlight interactions between morphological and word-prosodic structure. These topics underscore the importance of research on Mesoamerican languages to both phonological theory and linguistic typology.