Nasal Harmony in Awetí: A Declarative Account

Complex nasal segments (e.g. [mb], [nd], and [ŋɡ]) and nasal harmony are among the most prominent topics in lowland South American phonology (Storto & Demolin 2012), with the Tupí-Guaraní (TG) family being one of the major genetic groupings that exhibit these phenomena. Despite the ubiquity of these phenomena in TG languages, however, works on this family have not reached consensus on how to analyze them, with similar systems of nasality-related phenomena receiving starkly different analyses. This talk presents an analytical synthesis of the phonology of nasal segments in TG, based on a comprehensive review of descriptive and analytical works on these phenomena in the languages of the family. We focus on the analysis of allophonic alternations between fully nasal stops (e.g. [m]), partially nasal stops (e.g. [mb]), and fully oral voiced stops (e.g. [b]), and argue that empirical generalizations regarding these alternations support a unified analysis at the level of the whole family.

2023

2009

Several arguments have been put forward by some scholars regarding the source of nasalized vowels across languages. Greenberg (1966:509) posits that nasalized vowels derive from earlier states of oral vowels in proximity with nasal consonants. That is, a syllable-final sequence of an oral vowel followed by a nasal consonant, vN. According to Greenberg, the typical sequence of event from one point in the evolution of nasalized vowels to the final stage can be represented as: VN > V 7N > V 7. It then implies that an oral vowel assimilates the nasal feature of a syllable-final N and the latter (i.e. the N-coda) is deleted. Hyman (1972:171) and Williamson (1973:115) have a different view regarding the source of nasalized vowels. They note that some Benue-Kwa languages could historically have CNV sequence, meaning that the source of Kwa CV7 developed from a historic CNV. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the discussion by supporting the claim that the source of nasalized vo...

Reduplication in Indigenous languages of South America, 2014

0 Introduction This study describes reduplication in Awetí, a Brazilian indigenous language spoken byasmallpeoplelivinginthreevillagesintheregionoftheheadwatersoftheXingu river,MatoGrosso,centralBrazil. 1 Awetídoesnotbelongto,butistheclosestrelative of the well-known Tupí-Guaraní subfamily, the largest branch of the Tupí family. Mawé,AwetíandTupí-GuaranítogetherconstituteamajorbranchofTupí,"Mawetí-Guaraní"(RodriguesandDietrich1997;Drude2006;DrudeandMeirainprep.). The main interest this study may claim is of a methodological character: the contributionthatthestudyofreduplication(henceforth"RED",forshort)canmakefor the understanding of phonological and morphological units and processes, such as nasalization, abstract morpheme-final phonemes, identification of the stem and of morphemeboundaries,thederivation/inflectiondistinction,etc. Sections1and2serveasabasisfortheremainingpaper.Section1summarizes the phonological system of Awetí. Section2 gives some basic morphological properties and presents some diagnostic affixes used in the remaining sections. Then section3 gives a short general overview over RED in Awetí. Section4 describes the basic patterns of RED found with active (transitive and intransitive) verbs. The members of asmall particular subclass of these end in an unstressed syllable; these aretreatedinsection5.Section6usesevidencefromREDforacloserlookatcertain (morpho-)phonological alternations at the beginning and end of verbal stems. RED with stative verbs is treated in section7. Finally, the RED-related behavior of 1 ThegeneralknowledgeofAwetíunderlyingthisstudyisaresultoftenyearsofworkonAwetí,inclu-dingatotalofaroundfourteenmonthsoffieldwork.From2001to2005,theprojectwassupportedby the Volkswagen Foundation within the DOBES (Documentation of Endangered Languages) program, focusingondocumentingthelanguageandaspectsoftheculture.From2008on,myresearchhasbeen supportedbyaDilthey-fellowshipwhichagainallowsmetodofieldworkandtoinvitespeakerstothe Museu Goeldi in Belém. Reduplication has been studied, and the specific data used in this study has beenelicited,duringthefieldtripinApril/May2009.Iamverygratefulforthesupportbythefunding agencies, the Museu Goeldi and my Awetí teachers. I also owe thanks to several reviewers of earlier versions of this paper, in particular to an anonymous reviewer and the editors. Remaining shortcomingsareminealone.

2011

We discuss data from a range of Tupi-Guarani languages seeking for foundations for the hypothesis under which in early stages of the Tupi-Guarani family stress would have interacted with [+/- nasal] prosodic features yielding, among other things, patterns of nasal and post-oralized nasal consonants in the phonetic output of phonological words. Our hypothesis also states that the present day distribution of fully nasal, post-oralized nasal and voiced oral consonants across languages of different subbranches is the result of adjustments in the action's scope of such interface, oriented by principles of balanced symmetry between oral and nasal patterns.

Proceedings of the 38th Siouan and Caddoan Languages Conference, 2019

This paper lays out the conditions in which nasal harmony occurs in both languages. Hoocąk and Mandan share a common set of natural impediments to the spread of nasal harmony: supralaryngeal stops and mid vowels. Nasal harmony spreads unidirectionally until it meets one of these two blocking elements. The major distinction between these two languages is that nasal harmony is progressive in Hoocąk and regressive in Mandan. The difference between how Hoocąk and Mandan handle nasal harmony is not restricted to merely in which direction nasal harmony moves, but also onto which kinds of sonorants it may move. Previous research on Hoocąk, including Garvin & Hartmann (n.d.), Helmbrecht & Lehmann (2006), and Lipkind (1945) among others, has touched on the boundaries of nasal harmony, but has not detailed the specific morphophonological environments in which it occurs. Likewise, Hollow’s (1970) account of regressive nasal harmony in Mandan is insufficient to account for the many instances where nasal harmony is expected to occur, but is absent.

sx.ac.uk

Yami is an Austronesian language spoken in Lanyu Island, southeast of Taiwan. In this language, the nasal in the verbal prefixes, such as maN-, paN/paN/and N-, exhibits peculiar phonetic realization in relation to the following segments. The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to describe this phenomenon in a set of data taken from and the textbook by Tung and Rau (2000), and (2) to provide a theoretical analysis based on Optimality Theory .

Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), 2021

Nasal harmony in Paraguayan Guarani spreads mostly leftward in a morphological word. This regressive nasalization is triggered by a phonologically nasal consonant or stressed nasal vowel and does not affect voiceless stops. A limited process of progressive nasalization affects morpheme-initial voiceless stops across a morpheme boundary. Many forms that include a causative prefix show this kind of progressive nasalization. However, this nasal spread lacks any obvious nasal trigger and does not occur consistently. In this paper, I propose an explanation of these cases as vestiges of earlier phonological rules from pre-Proto-Tupi-Guarani but not active in Paraguayan Guarani, followed by the emergence of a regressive oralization rule and ending in a reanalysis of the basic form of the causative prefix. In so doing, I will provide a revised sequence of changes involving contour allophones in the reconstruction of Proto-Tupi-Guarani (PTG).

Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics, 2020

Following up on recent work, we consider morpheme-final nasals in the Nivkh language family of northeast Asia using the Standard Comparative Method, and attempt to reconstruct the inventory and morphophonemic behavior of morpheme-final nasal phonemes in Proto-Nivkh (PN). Previous work has pointed towards PN nasals at four loci, /*m/, /*n/, /*ɲ/, /*ŋ/, of which at least /*ŋ/ could be phonemically either "strong", triggering fricatives to surface across morpheme juncture, or "weak", triggering plosives to surface; with weak /*ŋ/ place-assimilating to following plosives across morpheme juncture, and weak /*n/ and weak /*ŋ/ elided in the Amur and West Sakhalin lects. However, with the benefit of more and better data than were available to previous authors, we find instead that elision must have been conditioned by a feature other than the strong-weak contrast (provisionally, length), but which interacted with the strong-weak contrast ("short" strong nasals were inextant), and that this "length" contrast also conditioned assimilation or non-assimilation of final /*ŋ/ (only "short" weak /*ŋ/ assimilated, not "long" weak /*ŋ/). We confirm that the strong-weak morphophonemic contrast existed for at least /*m/, /*ɲ/, and /*ŋ/ (rather than only for /*ŋ/), and the "length" contrast for /*n/ as well as /*ŋ/.

International Congress of Phonetic Sciences

This study describes a rather rare nasal voicing contrast in Upper Tanana (Dene/Athabascan). The language has a rich inventory of nasal segments, distinguishing oral and nasal vowels and three phonemic consonants /m/, /n/, /n̥ /. The voicing status of the coronal nasal (/n/ vs. /n̥ /) is morphologically conditioned and surfaces as marking the contrast between light (unsuffixed) vs. heavy (suffixed) stems. We use the Earbuds Method [1] to analyze nasal events acoustically in order to better understand the processes involved in this contrast. Data come from two female speakers (both in their 80s). The results of this analysis suggest that, acoustically, the contrast between /n/ vs. /n̥ / may be more precisely described as a timing contrast rather than a voicing contrast. Additionally, there is evidence that the entire nasal gesture may be shifting leftward into the vowel in the light stem variant, mirroring other developments in the Upper Tanana stem syllable.