Assimilatory Processes in Chuxnabán Mixe
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A Critique of the Separation Base Method for Genealogical Subgrouping, with Data from Mixe-Zoquean*
Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 2006, Volume 13, Numbers 2 – 3, pp. 225 – 264 DOI: 10.1080/09296170600850759 A Critique of the Separation Base Method for Genealogical Subgrouping, with Data from Mixe-Zoquean* Michael Cysouw, Søren Wichmann and David Kamholz Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig ABSTRACT Holm (2000) proposes the ‘‘separation base’’ method for determining subgroup relationships in a language family. The method is claimed to be superior to most approaches to lexicostatistics because the latter falls victim to the ‘‘proportionality trap’’, that is, the assumption that similarity is proportional to closeness of relationship. The principles underlying Holm’s method are innovative and not obviously incorrect. However, his only demonstration of the method is with Indo-European. This makes it difficult to interpret the results, because higher-order Indo-European subgrouping remains controversial. In order to have some basis for verification, we have tested the method on Mixe-Zoquean, a well-studied family of Mesoamerica whose subgrouping has been established by two scholars working independently and using the traditional comparative method. The results of our application of Holm’s method are significantly different from the currently accepted family tree of Mixe-Zoquean. We identify two basic sources of problems that arise when Holm’s approach is applied to our data. The first is reliance on an etymological dictionary of the proto-language in question, which creates problems of circularity that cannot be overcome. The second is that the method is sensitive to the amount of documentation available for the daughter languages, which has a distorting effect on the computed relationships. -
Phonetic Enhancement and Three Patterns of English A-Tensing
University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics Volume 23 Issue 1 Proceedings of the 40th Annual Penn Article 21 Linguistics Conference 2017 Phonetic Enhancement and Three Patterns of English a-Tensing Yining Nie New York University Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl Recommended Citation Nie, Yining (2017) "Phonetic Enhancement and Three Patterns of English a-Tensing," University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Vol. 23 : Iss. 1 , Article 21. Available at: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol23/iss1/21 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol23/iss1/21 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Phonetic Enhancement and Three Patterns of English a-Tensing Abstract English a-tensing has received numerous treatments in the phonological and sociolinguistic literature, but the question of why it occurs (i) at all and (ii) in seemingly unnatural disjunctive phonological environments has not been settled. This paper presents a novel phonetic enhancement account of a-tensing in Philadelphia, New York City and Belfast English. I propose that a-tensing is best understood as an allophonic process which facilitates the perceptual identity and articulatory ease of nasality, voicing and/or segment duration in the following consonant. This approach unifies the apparently unnatural phonological environments in which the two a variants surface and predicts the attested dialectal patterns. A synchronic account of a-tensing also provides -
Peering Into the Obstruent-Sonorant Divide: the View from /V
Peering into the obstruent-sonorant divide: The view from /v/ Christina Bjorndahl May 04, 2018 Cornell University, PhD Candidate Carnegie Mellon University, Visiting Scholar 1 Why /v/? Final Devoicing: /v/ → [f] / __# 4) [prava] [praf] ‘right (fem./masc.)’ Russian /v/: Final Devoicing Final Devoicing: /D/ → [T] /__# 1) [sleda] [slet] ‘track (gen./nom.sg)’ 2) [soka] [sok] ‘juice (gen./nom.sg)’ 3) [mil] *[mil] ‘dear’ ˚ 2 Russian /v/: Final Devoicing Final Devoicing: /D/ → [T] /__# 1) [sleda] [slet] ‘track (gen./nom.sg)’ 2) [soka] [sok] ‘juice (gen./nom.sg)’ 3) [mil] *[mil] ‘dear’ ˚ Final Devoicing: /v/ → [f] / __# 4) [prava] [praf] ‘right (fem./masc.)’ 2 Regressive Voicing Assimilation: /v/ → [f] / __T 9) /v ruke/ [v ruke] ‘in one’s hand’ 10) /v gorode/ [v gorode] ‘in the city’ 11) /v supe/ [f supe] ‘in the soup’ Russian /v/: Regressive Voicing Assimilation Regressive Voicing Assimilation: /D/ → [T] / __T 5) /pod-nesti/ [podnesti] ‘to bring (to)’ 6) /pod-ZetS/ [podZetS] ‘to set fire to’ 7) /pod-pisatj/ [potpisatj] ‘to sign’ 8) [volk] *[volk] ‘wolf’ ˚ 3 Russian /v/: Regressive Voicing Assimilation Regressive Voicing Assimilation: /D/ → [T] / __T 5) /pod-nesti/ [podnesti] ‘to bring (to)’ 6) /pod-ZetS/ [podZetS] ‘to set fire to’ 7) /pod-pisatj/ [potpisatj] ‘to sign’ 8) [volk] *[volk] ‘wolf’ ˚ Regressive Voicing Assimilation: /v/ → [f] / __T 9) /v ruke/ [v ruke] ‘in one’s hand’ 10) /v gorode/ [v gorode] ‘in the city’ 11) /v supe/ [f supe] ‘in the soup’ 3 Regressive Voicing Assimilation: /T/ 9 [D] / __v 15) /ot-vesti/ [otvesti] ‘lead away’ *[odvesti] -
A Grammar of Umbeyajts As Spoken by the Ikojts People of San Dionisio Del Mar, Oaxaca, Mexico
ResearchOnline@JCU This file is part of the following reference: Salminen, Mikko Benjamin (2016) A grammar of Umbeyajts as spoken by the Ikojts people of San Dionisio del Mar, Oaxaca, Mexico. PhD thesis, James Cook University. Access to this file is available from: http://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/50066/ The author has certified to JCU that they have made a reasonable effort to gain permission and acknowledge the owner of any third party copyright material included in this document. If you believe that this is not the case, please contact [email protected] and quote http://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/50066/ A Grammar of Umbeyajts as spoken by the Ikojts people of San Dionisio del Mar, Oaxaca, Mexico Mikko Benjamin Salminen, MA A thesis submitted to James Cook University, Cairns In fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Language and Culture Research Centre, Cairns Institute College of Arts, Society and Education - James Cook University October 2016 Copyright Care has been taken to avoid the infringement of anyone’s copyrights and to ensure the appropriate attributions of all reproduced materials in this work. Any copyright owner who believes their rights might have been infringed upon are kindly requested to contact the author by e-mail at [email protected]. The research presented and reported in this thesis was conducted in accordance with the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, 2007. The proposed research study received human ethics approval from the JCU Human Research Ethics Committee Approval Number H4268. -
The Emergence of Obstruents After High Vowels*
John Benjamins Publishing Company This is a contribution from Diachronica 29:4 © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only. Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute, it is not permitted to post this PDF on the open internet. For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com The emergence of obstruents after high vowels* David R. Mortensen University of Pittsburgh While a few cases of the emergence of obstruents after high vowels are found in the literature (Burling 1966, 1967, Blust 1994), no attempt has been made to comprehensively collect instances of this sound change or give them a unified explanation. This paper attempts to resolve this gap in the literature by introduc- ing a post-vocalic obstruent emergence (POE) as a recurring sound change with a phonetic (aerodynamic) basis. Possible cases are identified in Tibeto-Burman, Austronesian, and Grassfields Bantu. Special attention is given to a novel case in the Tibeto-Burman language Huishu. Keywords: epenthesis, sound change, aerodynamics, exemplar theory, Tibeto- Burman, Austronesian, Niger-Congo 1. -
FINAL OBSTRUENT VOICING in LAKOTA: PHONETIC EVIDENCE and PHONOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS Juliette Blevins Ander Egurtzegi Jan Ullrich
FINAL OBSTRUENT VOICING IN LAKOTA: PHONETIC EVIDENCE AND PHONOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS Juliette Blevins Ander Egurtzegi Jan Ullrich The Graduate Center, Centre National de la Recherche The Language City University of New York Scientifique / IKER (UMR5478) Conservancy Final obstruent devoicing is common in the world’s languages and constitutes a clear case of parallel phonological evolution. Final obstruent voicing, in contrast, is claimed to be rare or non - existent. Two distinct theoretical approaches crystalize around obstruent voicing patterns. Tradi - tional markedness accounts view these sound patterns as consequences of universal markedness constraints prohibiting voicing, or favoring voicelessness, in final position, and predict that final obstruent voicing does not exist. In contrast, phonetic-historical accounts explain skewed patterns of voicing in terms of common phonetically based devoicing tendencies, allowing for rare cases of final obstruent voicing under special conditions. In this article, phonetic and phonological evi - dence is offered for final obstruent voicing in Lakota, an indigenous Siouan language of the Great Plains of North America. In Lakota, oral stops /p/, /t/, and /k/ are regularly pronounced as [b], [l], and [ɡ] in word- and syllable-final position when phrase-final devoicing and preobstruent devoic - ing do not occur.* Keywords : final voicing, final devoicing, markedness, Lakota, rare sound patterns, laboratory phonology 1. Final obstruent devoicing and final obstruent voicing in phonological theory . There is wide agreement among phonologists and phoneticians that many of the world’s languages show evidence of final obstruent devoicing (Iverson & Salmons 2011). Like many common sound patterns, final obstruent devoicing has two basic in - stantiations: an active form, involving alternations, and a passive form, involving static distributional constraints. -
Spanish Diminutive Markers -Ito/-Ita in Mesoamerican Languages a Challenge for Acceptance of Gender Distinction Claudine Chamoreau
Spanish diminutive markers -ito/-ita in Mesoamerican languages A challenge for acceptance of gender distinction Claudine Chamoreau To cite this version: Claudine Chamoreau. Spanish diminutive markers -ito/-ita in Mesoamerican languages A challenge for acceptance of gender distinction. Akademie-Verlag. Morphologies in Contact, Akademie-Verlag, pp.71-91, 2012. halshs-00672257 HAL Id: halshs-00672257 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00672257 Submitted on 20 Feb 2012 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. CLAUDINE CHAMOREAU (PARIS) Spanish diminutive markers -ito/-ita in Mesoame- rican languages A challenge for acceptance of gender distinction Abstract This paper explores patterns in the borrowing of the Spanish diminutive markers -ito/-ita in some languages of Mesoamerica. These borrowings are particularly interesting because they encode two different categories: the diminutive category, and the grammatical gender category which distinguishes between a masculine form -ito and a feminine form, -ita. In Mesoamerican languages that have adopted the Spanish diminutive marker, the first category is already attested while the second is absent from all languages except Yucatec Maya. The primary aim in this paper is to establish the reasons why these languages have borrowed these markers even though they possess a device for expressing the diminutive category. -
The Contribution of Obstruent Consonants and Acoustic Landmarks to Speech Recognition in Noise
The contribution of obstruent consonants and acoustic landmarks to speech recognition in noise ͒ Ning Li and Philipos C. Loizoua Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75083-0688 ͑Received 14 April 2008; revised 8 September 2008; accepted 10 September 2008͒ The obstruent consonants ͑e.g., stops͒ are more susceptible to noise than vowels, raising the question whether the degradation of speech intelligibility in noise can be attributed, at least partially, to the loss of information carried by obstruent consonants. Experiment 1 assesses the contribution of obstruent consonants to speech recognition in noise by presenting sentences containing clean obstruent consonants but noise-corrupted voiced sounds ͑e.g., vowels͒. Results indicated substantial ͑threefold͒ improvement in speech recognition, particularly at low signal-to-noise ratio levels ͑−5 dB͒. Experiment 2 assessed the importance of providing partial information, within a frequency region, of the obstruent-consonant spectra while leaving the remaining spectral region unaltered ͑i.e., noise corrupted͒. Access to the low-frequency ͑0–1000 Hz͒ region of the clean obstruent-consonant spectra was found to be sufficient to realize significant improvements in performance and that was attributed to improvement in transmission of voicing information. The outcomes from the two experiments suggest that much of the improvement in performance must be due to the enhanced access to acoustic landmarks, evident in spectral discontinuities signaling the onsets of obstruent consonants. These landmarks, often blurred in noisy conditions, are critically important for understanding speech in noise for better determination of the syllable structure and word boundaries. © 2008 Acoustical Society of America. -
Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics Volume 21 Proceedings from the 13Th Annual Workshop on American Indigenous Languages
Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics Volume 21 Proceedings from the 13th Annual Workshop on American Indigenous Languages Daisy Rosenblum and Stephanie Gamble Morse, editors Table of Contents Editor’s Forward i Ejectives in Nez Perce 1 Katherine Nelson Assimilatory Processes in Chuxnabán Mixe 14 Carmen Jany The Role of Homophony Avoidance in Morphology: A case study from 29 Mixtec Mary Paster Hiaki Pronominals and the Typology of Deficiency 40 Heidi Harley and Alex Trueman Tense and Evidentiality in Sirionó and Yuki 55 Östen Dahl Complement Clause Types in Northern Tepehuan: A continuum of 68 semantic and syntactic complexity Stefanie Ramos Bierge Categorical Restrictions of Positional Verbs in Teotitlán del Valle 82 Zapotec Keiko Beers "There is no thermostat in the forest": Talking about temperature in 97 Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) Susanne Vejdemo and Hunter Lockwood Building an Intergenerational, Home-Based Language Nest 115 Melissa Borgia and Sandy Dowdy Foreward We are pleased to make the proceedings of the 13th annual Workshop on American Indigenous Languages (WAIL) available as the 21st volume of the Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics. We are grateful for the continuing support of the University of California, Santa Barbara as a whole and the faculty, staff and students of the Department of Linguistics. We extend our special thanks to Marianne Mithun. She offers us her support as well as opening her home for the conference. We also thank those who come from near and far to attend the conference. These proceedings represent only a portion of the papers presented. Thank you to all of you who helped expand our collective knowledge of the indigenous languages of the Americas. -
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas
Zurich Open Repository and Archive University of Zurich Main Library Strickhofstrasse 39 CH-8057 Zurich www.zora.uzh.ch Year: 2021 Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas Edited by: Mager, Manuel ; Oncevay, Arturo ; Rios, Annette ; Meza Ruiz, Ivan Vladimir ; Palmer, Alexis ; Neubig, Graham ; Kann, Katharina Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-203436 Edited Scientific Work Published Version The following work is licensed under a Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License. Originally published at: Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Edited by: Mager, Manuel; Oncevay, Arturo; Rios, Annette; Meza Ruiz, Ivan Vladimir; Palmer, Alexis; Neubig, Graham; Kann, Katharina (2021). Online: Association for Computational Linguistics. NAACL-HLT 2021 Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP) Proceedings of the First Workshop June 11, 2021 ©2021 The Association for Computational Linguistics These workshop proceedings are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Order copies of this and other ACL proceedings from: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 209 N. Eighth Street Stroudsburg, PA 18360 USA Tel: +1-570-476-8006 Fax: +1-570-476-0860 [email protected] ISBN 978-1-954085-44-2 ii Preface This area is in all probability unmatched, anywhere in the world, in its linguistic multiplicity and diversity. A couple of thousand languages and dialects, at present divided into 17 large families and 38 small ones, with several hundred unclassified single languages, are on record. -
Otomanguean Historical Linguistics: Past, Present and Prospects for the Future
Campbell, Eric W. 2017. Otomanguean historical linguistics: past, present and prospects for the future. Language & Linguistics Compass 11: e12240. -- this copy may differ slightly from published version 1 Otomanguean historical linguistics: past, present and prospects for the future 2 Abstract 3 Among the linguistic lineages of Mesoamerica, the Otomanguean family is the most diverse 4 and most widely spread. Long occupying a central position in one of the cradles of human 5 civilization, speakers of Otomanguean languages have played important roles in the region, 6 about which their languages have much to tell. However, Otomanguean is perhaps the least 7 understood of the major Mesoamerican language families, due to its great diversity, the 8 remarkable structural complexity of Otomanguean languages, and the history of the field of 9 Otomanguean historical linguistics, which has seen great achievement alternating with periodic 10 controversy and doubt. With a focus on the higher levels and more ancient time depths of the 11 family, this article surveys Otomanguean historical linguistic work and presents a state of the 12 art perspective on Otomanguean classification, reconstruction, linguistic prehistory, remaining 13 challenges, and prospects for the future. 14 1 Introduction 15 Otomanguean is an expansive language family that has been centered around the core of the 16 Mesoamerican cultural (Kirchhoff 1967[1943]) and linguistic area (Campbell et al. 1986) for 17 as long as we can detect. It extends a little beyond the northern limits of Mesoamerica into the 18 state of San Luis Potosí, Mexico (Pame), and it previously reached as far south as the Gulf of 19 Nicoya along the Pacific slope of Costa Rica (Mangue). -
Language EI Country Genetic Unit Speakers RI Acatepec Tlapanec 5
Language EI Country Genetic Unit Speakers RI Acatepec Tlapanec 5 Mexico Subtiapa-Tlapanec 33000 1 Alacatlatzala Mixtec 4.5 Mexico Mixtecan 23000 2 Alcozauca Mixtec 5 Mexico Mixtecan 10000 3 Aloápam Zapotec 4 Mexico Zapotecan 2100 4 Amatlán Zapotec 5 Mexico Zapotecan 6000 5 Amoltepec Mixtec 3 Mexico Mixtecan 6000 6 Ascunción Mixtepec Zapotec 1 Mexico Zapotecan 100 7 Atatláhuca Mixtec 5 Mexico Mixtecan 8300 8 Ayautla Mazatec 5 Mexico Popolocan 3500 9 Ayoquesco Zapotec 3 Mexico Zapotecan < 900 10 Ayutla Mixtec 5 Mexico Mixtecan 8500 11 Azoyú Tlapanec 1 Mexico Subtiapa-Tlapanec < 680 12 Aztingo Matlatzinca 1 Mexico Otopamean > < 100 13 Matlatzincan Cacaloxtepec Mixtec 2.5 Mexico Mixtecan < 850 14 Cajonos Zapotec 4 Mexico Zapotecan 5000 15 Central Hausteca Nahuatl 5 Mexico Uto-Aztecan 200000 16 Central Nahuatl 3 Mexico Uto-Aztecan 40000 17 Central Pame 4 Mexico Pamean 4350 18 Central Puebla Nahuatl 4.5 Mexico Uto-Aztecan 16000 19 Chaopan Zapotec 5 Mexico Zapotecan 24000 20 Chayuco Mixtec 5 Mexico Mixtecan 30000 21 Chazumba Mixtec 2 Mexico Mixtecan < 2,500 22 Chiapanec 1 Mexico Chiapanec-Mangue < 20 23 Chicahuaxtla Triqui 5 Mexico Mixtecan 6000 24 Chichicapan Zapotec 4 Mexico Zapotecan 4000 25 Chichimeca-Jonaz 3 Mexico Otopamean > < 200 26 Chichimec Chigmecatitlan Mixtec 3 Mexico Mixtecan 1600 27 Chiltepec Chinantec 3 Mexico Chinantecan < 1,000 28 Chimalapa Zoque 3.5 Mexico Zoque 4500 29 Chiquihuitlán Mazatec 3.5 Mexico Popolocan 2500 30 Chochotec 3 Mexico Popolocan 770 31 Coatecas Altas Zapotec 4 Mexico Zapotecan 5000 32 Coatepec Nahuatl 2.5