Vowels of Beryozovka Ewen: An Acoustic Phonetic Study

This study acoustically analyzes 13,540 vowel tokens of Beryozovka Ewen with the aid of automated post-transcriptional processing technique. The focus of the analysis is on the acoustic correlates of [RTR], which is the harmonic feature of the language. In addition to the first three formants, acoustic values representing spectral tilt such as H1−H2, H1−A2, and B1 are measured as potential acoustic cues of [RTR]. The results show that F1, F3, and B1 are the most reliable cues of the feature and that H1− H2 and H1−A2 are nearly reliable. These acoustic cues are also shown to interact with length and position. In general, the acoustic distance between [−RTR] and [+RTR] vowels are farther in long and word-initial vowels than in short and non-initial vowels, respectively. We claim that [RTR] is more appropriate for the harmonic feature of Ewen than [ATR], and that the greater perceptibility of word-initial vowels is understood as a means to facilitate the lexical access in a language with vowel harmony

An Investigation of the Articulatory Correlates of Vowel Anteriority in Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Turkish using Ultrasound Tongue Imaging

This paper presents an articulatory study of vowel production in three Turkic languages (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Turkish) using ultrasound tongue imaging in order to determine what aspects of tongue position correspond to the vowel anteriority contrasts in these languages, especially regarding the tongue body (TB) and tongue root (TR). The results of this study suggest that the Turkish vowel anteriority contrast involves mainly TB position, whereas the Kazakh and Kyrgyz vowel anteriority contrasts involve both TR and TB position. This latter pattern appears to confirm the existence of a type of vowel anteriority contrast whose existence has been hypothesised but not previously verified instrumentally

Conditions on Iterative Rounding Harmony in Oroqen

In this paper, we re-examine the claim that Baiyinna Oroqen, a language of the Tungusic family with a largely predictable distribution of non-high round vowels, requires a non-iterative type of rounding harmony, by demonstrating instead the need for a clear distinction between stem-internal morpheme structure constraints and suffixal vowel harmony. We also propose to revise what was thought to be a requirement that harmony donors must be anchored in two successive syllables; it is instead a restriction that copying of the harmonic feature must be from the closest non-initial vowel

The Acoustic Correlates of [ATR] Vowel Harmony in Somali

In the scholarship on the Somali language, lexical and syntactic structures have received disproportionately more attention than phonetic analyses. The goal of the present study was to empirically describe the relationship between tongue root harmony constraints and several other phonetic features of Somali vowels that affect vowel quality in the articulation of selected phonemes. To accomplish this, baseline measurements of the acoustic features of each set of [± ATR] (Advanced Tongue Root) vowel sounds were taken in spectrograms and compared across sets. The measurements made for each waveform include: fundamental frequency, formant 1, formant 2, formant 3 and vowel duration. The values were submitted to an independent samples t-tests. The tests indicate that F1 is the most reliable correlate of [ATR] followed by Duration. F2 is reliable for some vowel pairs while F3 demonstrated little significance. F0 was not a significant correlate in distinguishing between any vowel pairs

Tafxi:m in the vowels of Muslawi Qeltu and Baghdadi Gilit dialects of Mesopotamian Arabic

PhD ThesisTafxiːm defines a post-velar place of articulation, under which it may subsume consonantal (C) and vocalic (V) Place features for consonantal and vocalic elements that are the correlates of tafxi:m in sounds specified as underlyingly mufaxxama (heavy or dark) sounds in auditory terms (Jackobson,1957), also called post-velars (PVs). A considerable amount of research on tafxi:m in vowels is done on dialects of Arabic of different linguistic backgrounds (Herzallah, 1990; Zawaydeh, 1999; Shahin 2003). However, not much has been done on tafxi:m in the vowels of Mesopotamian Arabic (MA) dialects, the Muslawi Qəltu (MQ) and Baghdadi Gilit (BG) of two different linguistic backgrounds where tafxi:m in vowels is thought to be driven by the dialect background. In the dialects of Arabic including the Mesopotamian sedentary Muslawi Qəltu and Bedouin Baghdadi Gilit dialects under investigation, the post-velars (PVs) represent sounds with two locations for two manners of articulation: the pharyngeals which include the /ʕ/ and the /ħ/, and the uvulars which include the /q/, the /χ/ and /ʁ/. The third group of sounds are the pharyngealised coronals, the so-called emphatics (i.e. heavy or dark). They are represented with two places of articulation. The coronal place as their primary articulation and the pharyngeal place as their secondary articulation. The pharyngealised coronals include sounds with two manners of articulations; that is the stops /tˤ/, and the fricatives /ðˤ/and /sˤ/. They represent the dark or heavy counterparts of the plain stops /t/, /d/, and the plain fricatives /ð/, /s/ respectively (ibid). Tafxi:m in vowels as driven by PV mufaxxama sounds is defined as lowering, retraction, centralisation or as rounding being conditioned by the nature of articulatory feature (constriction) in the trigger PV mufaxxama and is being conditioned by the presence of particular lexemes identified as secondary mufaxxama. However, the featural manifestations of PVs in vowels, and the presence of secondary mufaxxama is phonologically governed by vowel quality and is specific to a particular language or dialect. In this research, it is found that the featural manifestation of tafxi:m are presented both locally and in long domain as backing and backing and rounding in the /i/ and /a/ vowels in Baghdadi Gilit of Bedouin origin with a significant drop in F2 onset in a uvular and pharyngealised PV context conditioned by lexemes identified as secondary PVs (mufaxxama) and are phonologically driven by the dialect background. III On the other hand, tafxi:m is featured as lowering in the /a/ vowel in Muslawi Qəltu of sedentary origin with a significant rise in F1 onset in a uvular context. In MQ, a sedentary vowel feature known as ʔima:la (vowel fronting) of /u/ and centralisation of /i/ vowels occur in domains where it is present as lowering or retraction of /u/ in Gilit. In long / i:, a:, u:/ vowels, tafxi:m is represented as lowering and centralisation with significant lowering of /i:/ and /u:/ in a uvular context in Muslawi Qəltu compared to /a:/ lowering and centralisation in a pharyngeal and pharyngealized context in Baghdadi Gilit. Tafxi:m is also represented as a feature of harmony which is introduced in non-local vowels as /u/ vowel colouring or /a/ backing in Baghdadi Gilit when secondary mufaxxama sounds are present in the same phonological domain

Contact-induced change in Dolgan : an investigation into the role of linguistic data for the reconstruction of a people’s (pre)history

This study explores the role of linguistic data in the reconstruction of Dolgan (pre)history. While most ethno-linguistic groups have a longstanding history and a clear ethnic and linguistic affiliation, the formation of the Dolgans has been a relatively recent development, and their ethnic origins as well as their linguistic affiliation have been a matter of debate. According to some scholars, the Dolgans, who inhabit the Taimyr Peninsula and the Anabar district of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), are Turkic people who adopted a Tungusic name and certain Tungusic cultural features. Others hold the view that they have Tungusic origins but shifted to a Turkic language. Migrations and frequent contacts with other ethnic groups complicate a reconstruction of their past. Accepting the idea that contact settings may correlate with linguistic outcomes, contact-induced changes in Dolgan are analysed and used to infer information about the nature of the contact settings in which they occurred. The linguistic conclusions are interpreted in a multidisciplinary context, integrating insights from history, ethnography as well as from population genetics. In particular, linguistic patterns of contact influence are correlated with genetic admixture patterns, providing new insights into the prehistoric migration patterns of the Dolgans. Due to its holistic approach, this study provides an example of the innovative ways in which data from different disciplines can be combined to gain a deeper understanding of a people__s past and identity, and provides a valuable contribution to the investigation of Siberian history.Max Planck SocietyLanguage Use in Past and Presen

Feature specifications and contrast in vowel harmony: the orthography and phonology of Old Norwegian height harmony

In this thesis, I provide a new approach to the role of phonological patterning in determining the featural content of phonological relations and the size and shape of sound inventories. The empirical scope of this project has particular focus on vowel harmony and vocalic features with an extended case study of Old Norwegian. Vowel harmony, simply defined, is a process where vowels in a word show systematic correspondence for some feature. Because of its many moving parts and obvious class behaviour, vowel harmony and harmony languages provide one of the best laboratories for exploring the emergence, acquisition, specification, and common patterning of phonological features. In chapter 1 I provide an introduction to Old Norwegian vowel harmony and some unexplained harmony exceptions. This chapter explores parallel phenomena in the typology of harmony languages and the theoretical challenges these patterns pose. In particular, I illustrate that non-harmonising segments display three distinct behaviours with respect to phonological activity and visibility while the core components of popular grammatical and representational approaches to vowel harmony commonly only predict two. I suggest the solution to this problem lies in the representation and definition of phonological contrastivity. Chapter 2 presents the principal components of a new approach to the acquisition and specification of features using a version of Contrastive Hierarchy Theory (Dresher, Piggott & Rice 1994; D. C. Hall 2007; Dresher 2003, 2009) which incorporates emergent and substance-free features and feature-nodes (Iosad 2017a). In this chapter I argue that phonological features, segments, feature classes, and whole sound inventories emerge according to the Correlate Contrastivist Hypothesis which holds that a language’s phonemic inventory is defined by the set of active phonological features required to express the language’s phonological regularities. Drawing insights from Westergaard’s (2009, 2013, 2014) model of micro-cues, I posit that language learners generalise small pieces of abstract linguistic structures (‘micro-cues’) in the form of features and feature co-occurrence restrictions while parsing linguistic input. In the course of language acquisition, these micro-cues accumulate, and the sum of these cues defines a sound inventory. I argue a segment’s feature specifications and the shape of feature classes in a language are determined by a version of the Successive Division Algorithm (Dresher 2009, §7.8; D. C. Hall 2007, §1.2.7; Mackenzie 2013, 2016) which takes an ordered set of representational micro-cues as its input and returns a contrastively specified segment inventory as its output. Finally, this chapter demonstrates how these components combined with the hierarchical organisation of features afforded by the contrastive hierarchy architecture recapitulates all the important insights of feature geometry, providing an economical and principled model of phonological representations which narrowly vary cross-linguistically. In chapter 3 I present a formal model of harmony using a licensing approach, adapted from Iosad (2017a) and Walker (2005), inspired by the recipient-oriented model of Nevins (2010). Using a detailed study of cross-dialectal microvariation in harmony and harmony neutrality in Yoruba (Atlantic-Congo), I demonstrate that this framework makes the right predictions, affording a ternary contrast in the behaviour of non-alternating harmony segments without any necessary additional grammatical mechanisms. A principal assumption of Contrastive Hierarchy Theory is that the hierarchical scope of features is cross-linguistically variable, and this chapter illustrates how variable feature ordering predicts common asymmetries across harmony languages in the presence or absence of required agreement for orthogonal features (so-called ‘parasitic harmony’). Specifically, the contrastive hierarchy derives parasitic harmony languages by nesting harmony feature contrasts within other featural divisions. This chapter closes with an exploration of the predicted typology of non-/parasitic systems and provides explicit diagnostics for identifying true vs. false parasitic harmony. The theoretical chapters present a coherent, limited, and highly predictive model of phonological representations and vowel harmony, but the real value of a theory is whether it can provide new insights on questions which have otherwise resisted explanation. Old Norwegian vowels and vowel harmony represent such an example. Old Norwegian vowel harmony displays remarkably complex patterns, and its analysis is considerably complicated by the philological nature of available evidence. Chapter 4 presents the materials and methods I employ for the automated collection and phonological annotation of Old Norwegian vowel sequences in a corpus of mid-to-late 13th-century manuscripts. The corpus study’s data set is freely available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/ gj6n-js33. Chapter 5 provides a grapho-phonological study of the Old Norwegian vowel inventory and segmental phonological patterns. This corpus study shows that Old Norwegian manuscripts display robust (pre-decay), transitional, and decayed vowel harmony, which provides invaluable empirical evidence for the otherwise poorly documented decay of harmony systems. The rest of the chapter provides a detailed survey of pre-decay Old Norwegian surface harmony patterns and their interaction with other sound processes and sound changes (e.g. umlauts, vowel deletions, and vowel mergers). A major goal of this project has been to develop tangible heuristics for the reconstruction of historical phonological representations on the basis of phonological patterns evidenced in textual source material. Tying together this thesis’ theoretical and empirical components, I show in chapter 6 how the active vocalic features and feature co-occurrence restrictions in Old Norwegian can be discerned according to the Correlate Contrastivist Hypothesis. In turn, the intricate harmony and neutral harmony patterns in Old Norwegian receive a straightforward explanation following these representational generalisations. This case study illustrates how even complex harmony systems such as Old Norwegian can be reduced to simple emergent effects of the categorisation and co-occurrence of features in contrastive feature hierarchies. This chapter concludes with a historical phonological investigation of the implications of this harmony system for the status of other Old Norwegian sound patterns. The main features of this thesis’ theoretical component and useful abstract schemata are provided in chapter 7 to aid in applying this framework to new data. For ease of comparison, I provide an appendix with contrastive hierarchies and summaries of each harmony language cited in this thesis. The unique contribution of Old Norwegian neutral harmony patterns within the typology of vowel harmony languages provides important evidence for the role of feature specifications and contrastivity in phonology. This thesis’ broad typological and narrow empirical studies confirm the descriptive and explanatory adequacy of the proposed framework in providing novel insights on new and old problems regarding the link between phonological representations and phonological patterns

The phonological systems of the Mbam languages of Cameroon with a focus on vowels and vowel harmony

The Mbam languages of Cameroon have a unique position in Bantu linguistics. Being in between “narrow” Bantu and “wide” Bantu, they sometimes pattern with the one and sometimes with the other, and as such are a rich motherlode for comparative and historical research. The Mbam languages have another point of interest as well. They have been previously analysed as standard 7 vowel languages (/i,e,ɛ,a,ɔ,o,u/) with Advanced Tongue Root (ATR) harmony. While vowel harmony in African languages has received a lot of attention and study, and the vowel-harmony systems of not a few of the Mbam languages have been studied, most of the previous studies have been on individual languages. This study seeks to analyse and compare the vowel systems of ten Mbam languages as a group: both their vowel inventories and their vowel-harmony systems. Various issues in vowel harmony, such as neutral vowels, directionality in and domains of vowel harmony are discussed. This study also proposes a phonological explanation for the functioning of the complex vowel-harmony systems found in the Mbam languages. Finally this study considers the internal classification of the Mbam languages and their position in the wider linguistic context of the Bantu and Bantoid languages.Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Alignment and Adjacency in Optimality Theory: evidence from Warlpiri and Arrernte

The goal of this thesis is to explore alignment and adjacency of constituents in the framework of Optimality Theory. Under the notion of alignment, certain categories, prosodic and morphological, are required to correspond to certain other categories, prosodic or morphological. The alignment of categories is achieved through the operation of constraints which evaluate the wellformedness of outputs. The constraints on the alignment of categories and the ranking of these constraints are examined with emphasis on two Australian languages, Warlpiri and Arrernte. The aim is to provide an adequate account in the theory of Optimality of the processes of stress, reduplication and vowel harmony evident in the data. The thesis expands on the range of edges for the alignment of feet. Foot alignment is developed to account for the fact that the edges of intonational phrases, morphemes, and specific morphemes, as well as phonologically specific syllables, play an active role in determining the location of feet. An additional finding is that the location of feet can also be determined by adjacency, resolving conflict between morphological alignment, and ensuring rhythmic harmony. Requirements on adjacency are further supported to account for segmental harmony, where harmony provides evidence for the simultaneous action of segmental and prosodic processes. The analysis provides a unified account of binary and ternary rhythm recommending modifications to alignment of certain categories, thereby laying the groundwork to deal with variation. The account of variation involves relaxing certain constraints. In addition, the notion of rhythm is expanded to account for onset sensitivity to stress, with evidence of this sensitivity found in reduplication and allomorphy. The interaction of prosodic categories with each other and with morphological categories can be directly captured in OT, providing a unified and coherent account of phenomena, some of which were previously seen as exceptions and, therefore unrelated and arbitrary