Assibilation in Trans-New Guinea languages of the Bird’s Head region Fanny Cottet Department of Linguistics College of Asia and the Pacific The Australian National University [email protected] Before enlarging the scope to other TNG languages of the Abstract region, the phonological and acoustic properties of Mbahám Previous studies have shown that assibilation of voiced stops assibilation are presented. Mbahám has been tentatively is less common than assibilation of voiceless stops, the former classified as a TNG language of the Bomberai sub-branch. Iha requiring complex and competing aerodynamic conditions to is the only language to which Mbahám is directly related; be produced. The present study reveals that voiced assibilation extended relations to other TNG languages are still under is found synchronically in various Trans-New Guinea investigation. The author is currently working on the phonetic languages of the Bird’s Head region, with the Mbahám and phonological description on the northern variety of the peculiarity that assibilation affects prenasalized voiced stops, a language spoken in the Kokas area (app. 200 speakers). case which has not been described previously. This paper reports new empirical data from previous understudied 2. Mbahám assibilation languages and provides evidences for a new treatment of the phonological inventory of these languages. 2.1. Phonological description In Mbahám, /t/ and /ⁿd/ assibilate before a sequence of two Index Terms: assibilation, Papuan languages, phonology, vocoids whose first segment is [+high]. Examples are given in phonetics, reconstruction. table 1. The triggering segment is realized either in a stressed or an unstressed syllable. In the latter case, the vocoid does not 1. Introduction form a syllable peak. The segments [j] and [w] belong to the onset position. This situation facilitates assibilation. This paper examines the phonological and phonetic aspects of assibilation in various Trans-New Guinea (TNG) languages of the Bird’s Head region (West Papua, Indonesia), with a Table 1. Assibilation of voiceless coronal stops and particular focus on Mbahám, a language of the Onin peninsula prenasalized voiced coronal stops in Mbahám. (app. 1000 speakers). One interesting feature of Mbahám assibilation is that it affects both voiceless stops and /tiɛ́kas/ [tʃjɛ́ɣas] food prenasalized voiced stops at the coronal place of articulation. /miⁿdíɛt/ [mindʒíɛt] bitter Assibilation for this latter class of sounds has not been /tiári/ [tʃjári] rain reported in studies on other languages. More generally, /kiⁿdián/ [kindʒján] person assibilation of voiced stops is considered to be more complex in terms of aerodynamic requirements ([1] and [2]) and is /túɔn/ [tʃúɔn] thigh therefore found less frequently than voiceless stop assibilation. /ⁿdúɔn/ [ndʒúɔn] to cut Hall & Hamann [3] and Hall, Hamann & Zygis [4] define assibilation as a process ‘which convert[s] a (coronal) stop to a In Mbahám, affricates surface in initial and medial sibilant affricate or fricative before high vocoids’. Assibilation positions of a word, but not word-finally; it only occurs covers palatalization, sibilant affrication and sibilantization in morpheme internally. Assibilation is distinct from lenition a [_i] context; similar aerodynamic, articulatory and processes such as voicing, spirantization and debuccalization perceptual conditions are involved in these three processes. also operating in the language in that assibilation is Coronal is the place of articulation the most affected by conditioned by the quality of the following vowel and is not assibilation [3]. As detailed in various studies ([3], [4] [5], [6] restricted to the intervocalic context. Unlike other processes, and [7]), assibilation originates from articulatory gestures at assibilation affects both voiceless and voiced stops. the stop-vowel transition: tongue movements in the oral cavity during the transition of a stop towards a high vowel create the 2.2. Acoustic experiment aerodynamic conditions to produce frication. At the stop release, the tongue moves away from the passive articulator to 2.2.1. Procedure produce the following segment. When this segment is a high front vowel, the tongue blade moves downward gradually; its The quantitative study consists in measuring and comparing movement is slower than for a non-high vowel [5]. A narrow the duration of the frication portion in voiceless and voiced channel is created between the tongue blade and the alveo- assibilated stops. Data consists of elicited wordlists which palatal region. Turbulence arises from the passage of the have been collected in Kokas village with four Mbahám airflow through this restricted tube; frication is produced and informants: KM, MT and LM (female speakers) and JT (male perceived by the listener ([3] and [8]). speaker). Recordings have been made with a head-mounted AKG C520 cardioid condenser plugged in a Marantz PMD661 digital recorder. Wide-band spectrograms with a window length of 5ms and a dynamic range of 50dB for female 2.2.3. Qualitative results speakers and 40dB for the male speaker JT are used for measurements of the present study. These settings suit the There is considerable inter-token variation in the quality of the range of frequencies of the different speakers. The fricative assibilated surface forms of /t/ and /ⁿd/, particularly portion is expected to have energy in high frequencies. The concerning prenasalized voiced segments. spectrogram window goes up to 8kHz. Settings have been set The frication release of /ⁿd/ may be produced with or to include four formants. Acoustic measurements follow Hall without voicing. Inter-speaker differences are observed. et al.’s [4] procedure and include the fricative release duration Speaker LM produces exclusively voiceless fricative release, from the stop burst to the onset of the following vowel, while speakers MT, KM and JT realize a voiced fricative release for approximately 35% of tokens. The tendency is thus comprising the burst itself, frication and aspiration. In addition to the quantitative study, qualitative observations of phonetic for an assibilated prenasalized voiced stop to be realized with forms are reported. They are based on spectrogram and a devoiced fricative release. Figure 2 shows a spectrogram and waveform indications, as well as perceptual data. Several waveform of the prenasalized affricate in the word /kaⁿdúɔkːa/ features are described: the presence of voicing, the realization [kandʃúɔkːa] stork pronounced by speaker LM. The blue of a burst and the place of articulation of the frication as well arrow indicates the portion of frication, during the stop as inter- and intra-speaker variations. For the present study, release. No voicing is produced. Figure 3 shows the 322 tokens in total have been measured (207 for /t/ and 115 pronunciation of /ⁿd/ in the word /miⁿdíɛt/ [mindʒíɛt] bitter by for /ⁿd/). speaker MT. Energy is observed in the voicing bar across the bottom of spectrogram, indicating the presence of voicing. 20120915 bdw lm stork 4th-repet absence-voicing 2.2.2. Quantitative results 8000 For all Mbahám speakers, /t/ assibilated allophones have a longer frication than /ⁿd/ allophones. This difference is statistically significant for most speakers, with the exception 5000 of KM for whom there is a large variation (table 2). Table 2. Mean duration (in ms) of the frication of Frequency (Hz) /t/ and /ⁿd/ assibilated surface forms. 0 /ⁿd/ /t/ One-way ANOVA 10.3 10.7 Time (s) JT 40.29 (13) 51.51 (13) F[1,86]=15.26, p < .001 0.1 KM 56.53 (18) 63.73 (20) F[1,103]=3.555, p = .062 LM 49.71 (9) 59.70 (12) F[1.55]=9.885, p = .003 0 MT 46.05 (15) 58.14 (17) F[1,70]=8.074, p = .006 The duration of fricated release for voiceless stops and prenasalized voiced stops is represented on figure 1, for each speaker. -0.15 10.3 10.7 Duration of the frication Time (s) Figure 2. Spectrogram and waveform of [ndʃ] in /kaⁿdúɔkːa/ [kandʃúɔkːa] ‘stork’: no voicing at the fricative release. 20120918 bdw mt bitter 3rd-repet burst 120 8000 100 5000 80 voicing voiced Frequency (Hz) voiceless Duration (ms) Duration 60 0 8.3 8.7 0.04 Time (s) 40 0 20 JT KM LM MT Speakers Figure 1. Duration of the frication of /t/ and /ⁿd/ assibilated -0.046 forms for four Mbahám speakers. 8.3 8.7 Time (s) Figure 3. Spectrogram and waveform of [ndʒ] in /miⁿdíɛt/ [mindʒíɛt] ‘bitter’: voicing at the fricative release. In Mbahám, assibilated forms of /ⁿd/ may be produced works that consider surfacing affricates in these languages as with or without an audible burst. An (non-nasal) oral closure part of the phonological inventory. might precede the burst (as in figure 2) or not (as in figure 3). In this latter case, the surface form is similar to a nasal- 3.1. Languages of the SBH group fricative sequence. Some tokens might be produced with two Cases similar to Mbahám assibilation are found in Kokoda and successive releases visible on the spectrogram. Puragi, for which de Vries [11] provides brief phone Frication release may be produced in the alveolar region inventories and word lists. In Kokoda, I suggest that /t/ is or further back in the palatal region. There is a substantial produced as [ɕ] or [tɕ] and /d/ as [ɟ] in the [_i] context, as a range of inter-speaker variation. Speaker JT produces mainly case of palatalization. This analysis is based on various palatal frication, while the female speakers realize one or the observations of de Vries’ data and is particularly motivated by other. Variation between an anterior and more posterior the infrequency of voiceless and voiced stops before high pronunciations are heard for both /t/ and /ⁿd/. vocoids in the corpus (2 words out of 209 for /t/ and /ⁿd/ 2.2.4. Discussion respectively). Also, the word [ɕigaɕigaja] cold in Kokoda is related to the word [tigatiga] in Arandai dialects (wordlist Results on the duration of fricative release of assibilated stops from [12]), revealing a probable diachronic process of in Mbahám correspond to Hall et al.’s [4] findings on German assibilation in Kokoda.