ATR vowel harmony is a common feature in African languages that has received massive scholarly work. Although some of these languages have both phonemic oral and nasal vowels, only the oral vowels usually feature in descriptions and analyses. Also, although some of these languages have phonemic nasal vowels, Rolle (2013) notes that phonemic /ẽ, õ/ nasal vowels are missing in some West African languages. He notes further that, earlier, Hyman (1972) had observed that [n] (and sometimes [m] does not occur before mid vowels), hence the restricted patterns *[ne]~*[nẽ] and *[no]~*[nõ]. If these vowels are barred and their possible occurrences are restricted, are there other means for them to be realized in these languages? In this paper, I present data on the interactions between ATR vowel harmony and nasality in Gua (a Guang language of Ghana) and shows that nasal vowels fully participate in the harmony process, and where nasal vowels /ẽ, õ, ɜ̃/ are missing, they are created allophonically [ẽ, õ, ɜ̃] via ATR vowel harmony, nasalization and a combination of both processes in the language. This is similar to harmony patterns in African languages where missing oral vowels in seven vowel systems are created allophonically (Rose 2018 and Casali 2003). I further discuss some typological implications of the patterns and useful questions that will guide further research in these interactions.

References cited:
Casali, R. F. 2003. [ATR] value asymmetries and underlying vowel inventory structure in Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan. Linguistic Typology 7, pp. 307-382
Hyman, L. M. 1972. “Nasals and nasalization in Kwa”. Studies in African Linguistics, 3.2, pp. 167-205.
Rolle, N. 2013. Nasal vowel patterns in West Africa. UC Berkeley PhonLab Annual Report 9.9.
Rose, S. 2018. ATR Vowel Harmony: new patterns and diagnostics. In Proceedings of the 2017 Annual Meeting on Phonology (Vol. 5).

Yateé Zapotec is spoken in San Francisco Yateé (Oaxaca, Mexico), as well as by diaspora communities around Los Angeles, USA. There are approximately 480 speakers of Yateé Zapotec in Oaxaca in 2017. The talk presents the acoustic and phonological properties of the fortis and lenis consonants, the modal, creaky, and checked phonations, and the interaction between phonation and tone in Yateé Zapotec.

Alignment (McCarthy & Prince 1993) has played a role in a number of recent analyses of Arabic templatic morphology (e.g. Ussishkin 2003, Tucker 2010, Wallace 2013) set within Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky [1993] 2004) / Generalized Template Theory (GTT; McCarthy & Prince 1995). However, the driving forces in most GTT analyses (Ussishkin 2000, 2003, Tucker 2010, 2011, Kastner 2016, a.o.) have been prosodic markedness constraints.

In this talk, I show that deploying a more extensive alignment-based system, grounded morphosyntactically via the “Mirror Alignment Principle” (Zukoff to appear), can derive the morphophonological properties of the Arabic verbal system without prosodic constraints. Like all GTT accounts, much of the remaining ground is covered by basic faithfulness and markedness constraints, though here specifically linear markedness not prosodic markedness. The main additional piece of the analysis is a single lexically-indexed markedness constraint that drives irregular CV-sequencing behavior of certain affixes. This analysis thus supports McCarthy’s (1993) contention that the Arabic verbal system is not an instance of prosodic morphology, per se.

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You can learn more about Sam Zukoff and his work here.

Day & time: Mondays 12-1pm (unless otherwise noted)
Location: Zoom (send email to Eric Baković for the link, or join the mailing list)

This paper presents a preliminary description and analysis of the intonational patterns and phrasal domains involved in simple declarative and interrogative sentences in Cahuilla, an understudied Uto-Aztecan language of Southern California. To my knowledge, no such description or analysis on the topic of Cahuilla intonation has been proposed for any of its dialects or varieties. Following the basic principles and assumptions of the autosegmental-metrical (AM) framework for intonation originally set forth by Liberman (1975), Bruce (1977), Pierrehumbert (1980), and later rearticulated by Ladd (2008) and others, I describe and analyze intonational data from a single, elderly fluent speaker of the Torres-Martinez variety of the Desert Cahuilla dialect, which I then use to propose a tentative intonational tonal inventory and model for Cahuilla. Since this study is focused primarily on the annotation of intonational pitch accents and contours for the language, I leave aside the issue of developing a break indices system for future research. Thus, this study can be considered a first step in the development of a ToBI-like system (as outlined in Silverman et al. (1992); Beckman and Hirschberg (1994); Beckman and Ayers (1997); and Beckman et al. (2005)) for annotating intonational patterns in Cahuilla. Furthermore, given the paucity of intonational research on American Indian languages (e.g., Chickasaw; Gordon 2005, Lakota; Mirzayan 2010), this paper contributes to a building body of cross-linguistic research, being spearheaded by Jun (2005, 2014) and others, on the ability of an AM-based system of annotation like ToBI to model a broad range of intonation systems.

A musical surrogate language is a way of encoding language with musical instruments, allowing people to communicate with one another using those instruments instead of speech. This talk will describe the musical surrogate language of Northern Toussian, demonstrating which aspects of the phonology of the spoken language are encoded by the surrogate languages.

Day & time: Mondays 12-1pm (unless otherwise noted)
Location: Zoom (send email to Eric Baković for the link, or join the mailing list)

This talk examines countercyclic interactions of phonological processes and discusses their consequences for phonology and its interfaces with morphology and syntax. An interaction between two processes is countercyclic, if a process associated with a bigger domain seems to have applied before a process in a smaller domain that is contained in the outer domain.

Countercyclicity is diagnosed when the process in the smaller domain is fed or bled by the process in the bigger domain, or reversely, the process in the bigger domain is counterfed or counterbled by the process in the smaller domain. The apparent absence of such cases is an argument in favour of cyclic theories of the morphology/syntax interface (such as Lexical Morphology and Phonology, Stratal OT, Cophonologies by Phase, or SPE), where phonological computation is tied to morphosyntactic structure building.

However, there is a limited number of reported cases that have been claimed to instantiate this type of countercyclic interactions. If true, they posit a challenge to cyclic phonological theories. In this talk, I argue that all attested cases can be reanalysed, thus not disproving cyclicity, the key factor for reanalysis being the consideration of prosodic structure.

Daniel Gleim is a PhD candidate in the “Interaction of Grammatical Building Blocks” (IGRA) program at the University of Leipzig.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) draws a fundamental distinction between consonants that are voiceless and those that are voiced. For glottal consonants, however, this distinction is problematic. The voiceless glottal stop [ʔ] and fricative [h] are usually realized as creaky and breathy voice, respectively, when they occur between vowels and in weak prosodic positions (Pierrehumbert & Talkin 1992, Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996). Although voicing of [ʔ] and [h] is pervasive, the IPA still distinguishes these sounds from their voiced counterparts, e.g. voiceless [h] vs. voiced [ɦ]. Do voiceless and voiced glottal sounds really differ in terms of their voicing, and if so, how? I will present a phonetic analysis of glottal sounds in “Illustrations of the IPA”– short papers published in Journal of the IPA that illustrate the main sounds of a language with accompanying audio. An analysis of the audio recordings confirms that voicing variation is widespread for both voiceless and voiced glottal sounds. Voiceless [h] is only slightly less voiced than voiced [ɦ], and only in utterance-initial position; elsewhere, both [h] and [ɦ] are as strongly voiced as breathy vowels. Creaky vowels are more strongly voiced than glottal stops, unless the creaky vowels are described as being “rearticulated” or “checked.” Based on these results, I argue that voicing during glottal sounds is largely predictable from respiratory and prosodic factors. In many languages then, glottal sounds can be considered phonetically unspecified for voicing.

Phonological elements can be positionally licensed such that they occur in particular positions and not elsewhere. We focus on two dimensions of variation in violable constraint-based analyses of positional licensing patterns here, following Jesney (2016): the type of constraint that (in)directly references licensing positions (markedness, faithfulness, or both) and the type of interaction between constraints (numerical weighting, as in Harmonic Grammar, or hierarchical ranking, as in Optimality Theory). We elucidate the formal and typological similarities and differences among systems that vary along these dimensions, based on an analysis of a representative set of systems. We then sketch how our results might be generalized to all violable constraint-based systems, given that any constraint that mentions two or more elements can be framed as a constraint on one element (the ‘filler’) in the context of the other(s) (the ‘role’), the latter playing the part of the ‘positions’ in the positional licensing systems.

(The first part of this work was presented as a poster at AMP 2020. Here are the abstract, poster, and 5-min. video that we created for that presentation.)