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.)

Rere (Kordofanian, Sudan) has a complex system of grammatical tonal marking on verbs when both subject and object participants are expressed. There are verbs forms in which the position and segmental content of the participant markers are the same, but tone indicates whether the markers are interpreted as either subjects or objects. In addition, tone can distinguish the person/number of different subject markers. I will show how the verb is highly compositional in expressing multiple factors: tense/aspect/mood, lexical verb classes, subjects, objects and plurality. The expression of these categories, combined with tone spreading, results in several tonal minimal triplets, but a system that is highly regular.

Mondays 12-1pm (unless otherwise noted), Zoom (send email to Eric Baković for the link)

Mondays 1-2pm (unless otherwise noted), Field Lab (AP&M 2452)

Mondays 1-2pm (unless otherwise noted), Field Lab (AP&M 2452)

Mondays 12-1pm (unless otherwise noted), Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)

Mondays 1-2pm (unless otherwise noted), Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)

Monday, November 5, 2018
12:30pm, Field Lab

Wendy comes from San Cristóbal de Las Casas (Chiapas, Mexico) and is a native speaker of Sierra Popoluca, a Mixe-Zoquean language spoken in the southern part of the Mexican State of Veracruz. She recently received her MA in Linguistics at CIESAS Sureste in San Cristóbal de Las Casas with a thesis on “Morphosyntactic mechanisms of valency changes in Sierra Popoluca” with Roberto Zavala. If you want to know more about Wendy and her work, feel free to check the brief video interview she recorded for Ivano and his colleagues’ project, “Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages”. Wendy speaks in Sierra Popoluca up to 1:42 min, then repeats and further elaborates in Spanish.

If you would like to meet with Wendy during her visit, please let Sharon or Ivano know.

Mondays 12:30-1:30pm (unless otherwise noted), Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)