1 1 PHONETIC AND PHONOLOGICAL RESEARCH ON NATIVE AMERICAN 2 LANGUAGES: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE1 3 4 MATTHEW K. GORDON 5 6 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA 7 2 8 TABLE OF CONTENTS 9 10 1. Introduction 11 2. Early research on the sound systems of Native American languages 12 3. Instrumental phonetic research on Native American Languages 13 4. Phonological research on Native American Languages 14 5. Four case studies of the phonetics and phonology of Native American Languages 15 5.1. Iambic metrical structure 16 5.1.1. Iambic lengthening in Chickasaw 17 5.1.2. High tone assignment in Creek 18 5.2. Weight-sensitive tone 19 5.3. Prosodic morphology 20 5.4. Phonetics and phonology in language endangerment and revitalization 21 6. Prospects for the future 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 3 30 1. Introduction 31 32 The study of Native American languages has played a prominent role in the development 33 of modern phonetic and phonological description and theory. Dating back to pioneering 34 work in the early 20th century by Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Pliny Earl Goddard, 35 detailed case studies of native languages of the Western Hemisphere have been integral 36 to fleshing out the typological variation in sound systems that serves as the basis for 37 theory construction and evaluation. Many of the insights of modern phonetics and 38 phonology crucially rely on the discovery in Native American language of features not 39 found in the Indo-European and Uralic languages providing the fodder for the pioneering 40 linguistic research of the 19th century. The advancements in phonetics and phonology 41 inspired by the study of Native American languages span diverse subfields, including 42 acoustic, articulatory, and auditory phonetics and phonological description and theory. 43 The breadth of methodologies attested in research on indigenous languages of the 44 Americas is matched by the wide range of phenomena that have been investigated. The 45 combination of the phonetic and phonological diversity and, in many cases, complexity 46 of Native American languages coupled with their relatively understudied status ensures 47 their continued importance in the enhancement of our understanding of phonetics and 48 phonology. On a practical level, new avenues of research on the phonetics and phonology 49 of Native American languages have also emerged as communities engage in language 50 revitalization efforts. 4 51 This paper provides an overview of how research on Native American languages 52 has contributed to advances in the fields of phonetics and phonology, spanning the period 53 shortly before the publication of IJAL’s inaugural issue in 1917 to the present. In order 54 to operationalize the presentation, discussion will be organized around the division 55 between instrumental phonetic studies and descriptive and theoretical research in 56 phonology, even though in practice the two threads of research are closely intertwined. 57 Work on languages spoken throughout the Americas will be discussed with emphasis on 58 languages of the Southeastern United States, which serve as the basis for three presented 59 case studies attesting to the important contributions of this linguistic area to our 60 knowledge of phonetics and phonology. A fourth case study is devoted to an increasingly 61 prominent area of work: the study of phonetic and phonological characteristics of 62 speakers, semi-speakers and learners of endangered languages. 63 64 2. Early research on the sound systems of Native American languages 65 In his introduction to the inaugural issue of IJAL in 1917, Franz Boas recognized the 66 relatively impoverished state of knowledge of Native American languages (especially 67 those of Central and South America) at that time but also expressed hope that recent 68 progress in the scope of material collected and the methodologies employed in its 69 collection augured well for future research. He also was well aware of the fragile status of 70 many languages owing to the rapid encroachment of socially and culturally dominant 71 European languages, contact with which threatened to dramatically alter the indigenous 5 72 languages of the Americas, e.g. the strength of the glottalized stops in languages of the 73 Pacific coast (Boas 1917a:2). 74 At the time of IJAL’s first edition, there had already been some descriptive 75 phonetic and phonological work on Native American languages of North America that 76 was considerably more rigorous than early cursory descriptions from explorers, 77 missionaries and traders. Research at the turn of the 20th century focused on descriptions 78 of particular languages and the synthesis of material from multiple languages to establish 79 genetic relationships between languages. Boas himself had published extensively on 80 Native American languages, including chapters on Tsimshian, Chinook, and Kwakiutl in 81 his own edited volume Handbook of American Indian Languages (Boas 1911), which 82 also contained descriptions of Tlingit, Haida, Fox, Maidu, Dakota, and Inuktitut. Sapir 83 was also already a prominent figure in language documentation and historical- 84 comparative linguistics by the time of IJAL’s inauguration, having published language 85 descriptions and comparative work on Chinookan, Wakashan, Uto-Aztecan, Na Dene, 86 and Takelma. 87 As portended by Boas, IJAL would play an integral role in the promotion of 88 research on Native American languages, including in the areas of phonetics and 89 phonology. Boas himself was at the vanguard of advancing IJAL’s agenda, publishing in 90 the first issue a description of the now extinct Pochutec variety of Nahuatl, including 91 several pages of phonology (Boas 1917b). 92 Boas’ paper on Pochutec would set a template for many future papers in IJAL that 93 provide language descriptions, which characteristically include a section devoted to 6 94 phonology. This traditional type of grammatical overview paper has been supplemented 95 with an increasing number of publications focused on particular phonetic or phonological 96 topics. Concomitant with the narrowing in scope of individual papers, progressively more 97 research is also showcased in non-areal journals publishing research in phonetics and/or 98 phonology. Through these publications as well as through early language descriptions 99 that still retain their importance, phonetic and phonological research on Native American 100 languages has played a prominent role in shaping the fields of phonetics and phonology. 101 The remainder of the paper summarizes these contributions from an historical 102 perspective, starting in the next section with phonetics. 103 104 3. Instrumental phonetic research on Native American Languages 105 106 In his introduction to IJAL, Boas (1917a) singles out for commendation the phonetic 107 fieldwork conducted by Pliny Earle Goddard at the turn of the 20th century on the Pacific 108 Coast Athabaskan languages Hupa and Kato (Goddard 1907; 1912). Goddard’s work was 109 ambitious in its employment of an impressive array of instrumental techniques to 110 investigate the aerodynamic and articulatory characteristics of both languages, Hupa 111 more comprehensively than Kato. His methodologies included photography to assess the 112 position of the mouth during the production of vowels, palatography to examine the 113 location of contact between the tongue and the roof of the mouth, and kymography, to 114 investigate fluctuations in air pressure during speech. The kymograph could be outfitted 115 with different fittings to analyze data produced at different sources, including the mouth, 7 116 the nose, and the larynx. In a later study, Goddard (1928) investigated pitch variation to 117 demonstrate that Hupa (like other Pacific Coast Athabaskan languages and unlike 118 Southern Athabaskan and many Northern Athabaskan languages) does not use tone to 119 mark lexical contrasts. Goddard’s use of multiple instrumental methodologies was far 120 ahead of its time, only reemerging again at the end of the 20th century albeit with far 121 more sophisticated tools (see below). 122 Figure 1 illustrates two representative palatograms from Goddard (1907). The one 123 on the left shows the contact pattern on the roof of the mouth for the denti-alveolar /t/ in 124 /taw/ ‘no’, while the one on the right shows contact for the palatalized velar in /kʲʰa/ 125 ‘dress’. In both palatograms, the area depicted is the region in front of the velum; 126 palatography is thus not an effective methodology for examining contact patterns for 127 posterior articulations. The contact between the tongue and the roof of the mouth, 128 represented as the dark region, is fairly broad in the front-back domain for the denti- 129 alveolar, extending from the alveolar ridge all the way forward to the back of the upper 130 teeth. For the palatalized velar stop, contact extends along both sides of the mouth 131 forward in a triangular pattern indicative of a raised tongue body associated with the 132 secondary palatalization gesture. The velar closure does not show up in the palatogram 133 since it is behind the depicted region. 134 8 135 136 Figure 1. Palatograms of the denti-alveolar stop in /t/ in /taw/ ‘no’ (on left) and the 137 palatalized velar in /kʲʰa/ ‘dress’ (on right) (Goddard 1907). 138 139 Figure 2 shows kymography traces from the mouth (the top line) and nose (the 140 bottom line) in the word /tʰaʔnaːn/ ‘water, to drink’ (Goddard 1907). 141 9 Oral Nasal 142 143 t ʰ a ʔ n aː n 144 145 146 Figure 2. Kymography traces for the oral (top) and nasal (bottom) air in the word 147 /tʰaʔnaːn/ ‘water, to drink’. 148 149 The general relationship between oral and nasal flow is evident in the figure: as air comes 150 out through the nose in the production of the two nasals, it ceases to vent through the 151 mouth, although there is a brief transitional period of coarticulation between the nasal and 152 adjacent vowels during which air escapes through both the nose and mouth.