On the universality of prosodic reflexes of contrast: The case of Yucatec Maya

This paper is about the tonal realization of contrastive focus in Yucatec Maya. Examining sentences with in situ focused adjectives (postverbally) we observe neither durational dif-ferences as compared to non-contrastive sentences nor any differences in F0 except for a higher non-contrastive high tone. Yucatec Maya, being a tone language, seems to use prosodic means exclusively to express tonal contrasts, thus belonging to a language type without prosodic marking of contrast