400 220 Natalia Aralova Natalia Aralova Natalia Aralova Vowel harmony in two Even Vowel harmony in two Even dialects dialects Production and perception Production and perception This dissertation analyzes vowel systems in two dialects of Even, an endangered Northern Tungusic language spoken in Eastern Siberia. The data were collected during fieldwork in the Bystraia district of Central Kamchatka and in the village of Sebian-Küöl in Yakutia. The focus of the study is the Even system of vowel harmony, which in previous literature has been assumed to be robust. The central question concerns the number of vowel oppositions and the nature of the feature underlying the opposition between harmonic sets. The results of an acoustic study show a consistent pattern for only one acoustic parameter, namely F1, which can harmony in two Even dialects Vowel be phonologically interpreted as a feature [±height]. This acoustic study is supplemented by perception experiments. The results of the latter suggest that perceptually there is no harmonic opposition for high vowels, i.e., the harmonic pairs of high vowels have merged. Moreover, in the dialect of the Bystraia district certain consonants function as perceptual cues for the harmonic set of a word. In other words, the Bystraia Even harmony system, which was previously based on vowels, is being transformed into new oppositions among consonants. ISBN 978-94-6093-180-2 Vowel harmony in two Even dialects: Production and perception Published by LOT phone: +31 30 253 6111 Trans 10 3512 JK Utrecht e-mail: [email protected] The Netherlands http://www.lotschool.nl Cover illustration: Even reindeer herder Anatoly Afanasyevich Solodikov, Central Kamchatka. Photo by Brigitte Pakendorf. ISBN: 978-94-6093-180-2 NUR 616 Copyright © 2015: Natalia Aralova. All rights reserved. Vowel harmony in two Even dialects: Production and perception ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. D.C. van den Boom ten overstaan van een door het College voor Promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Aula der Universiteit op vrijdag 4 september 2015, te 11.00 uur door Natalia Aralova geboren te Mytischi, Rusland Promotiecommissie Promotores: Prof. Dr. B. Pakendorf Université Lumière (Lyon II) Prof. Dr. P.P.G. Boersma Universiteit van Amsterdam Copromotores: Dr. S.R. Hamann Universiteit van Amsterdam Dr. S. Grawunder Max Planck Institute Overige leden: Prof. Dr. P.C. Hengeveld Universiteit van Amsterdam Prof. Dr. A.P. Versloot Universiteit van Amsterdam Dr. C. Odé Universiteit van Amsterdam Prof. Dr. A.V. Dybo Russian State University for the Humanities Dr. Y. Chen Universiteit Leiden Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen Contents Acknowledgements v Funding vi Author contributions vi Abbreviations and symbols vii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Geographical location and genealogical affiliation 2 1.2 Dialects 5 1.3 Contact and sociolinguistic situation 8 1.4 Previous studies on Even 10 1.5 Types of data used for the analysis 11 1.6 Structure of the dissertation 12 2 Introduction to Even phonology with a focus on vowels 15 2.1 Consonants 15 2.1.1 Phonetic description and allophonic variation 16 2.1.1.1 Stops 16 2.1.1.2 Fricative 18 2.1.1.3 Affricates 18 2.1.1.4 Nasals 19 2.1.1.5 Lateral glide 19 2.1.1.6 Trill 20 2.1.1.7 Semivowels 20 2.1.2 Minimal pairs for consonants 21 2.1.3 Regular phonological processes for consonants: ii Contents Assimilation 23 2.2 Vowels 27 2.2.1 Correspondence of orthographies and transcriptions 28 2.2.2 Phonetic description and allophonic variation of vowels 29 2.2.3 Minimal and quasi-minimal pairs 33 2.3 Phonotactics 35 2.3.1 Syllable structure 35 2.3.2 Vowel harmony 38 2.4 Description of the vowel opposition by different scholars 39 2.5 Research question 44 3 Acoustic characteristics of Even vowels and the question of RTR/ATR 47 3.1. Pharyngealization and RTR/ATR 47 3.1.1 The RTR/ATR distinction: a brief history 48 3.1.2 Description of the RTR/ATR distinction 49 3.1.3 Acoustic correlates of the RTR/ATR distinction 54 3.1.4 Acoustic and articulatory data in Tungusic languages 57 3.2 Even data on vowel quality: analysis of vowel production 60 3.2.1 Methods 61 3.2.1.1 Speakers and recording settings 61 3.2.1.2 Data 62 3.2.1.3 Acoustic analysis 65 3.2.1.4 Statistical analysis 67 3.2.2 Results 68 3.2.2.1 F1 68 3.2.2.2 F2 71 3.2.2.3 F3 73 3.2.2.4 Spectral slope 76 3.2.2.5 Duration 78 3.2.3 Summary 87 3.3 Discussion 89 Contents iii 4 Perception study of harmonic vowel sets 95 4.1 Experiments in perception 95 4.2 Experimental data from Even speakers 98 4.2.1 Research questions and experiments 98 4.2.2 Stimuli 99 4.2.3 Participants and settings 107 4.2.4 Results 108 4.2.4.1 Experiment 1 108 4.2.4.2 Experiment 2 119 4.2.4.3 Experiment 3 125 4.3 Discussion 130 5 The role of consonants in the system of vowel harmony 135 5.1 Cross-linguistic evidence and the data from Even dialects 135 5.2 Acoustic variation of /r/ in Even 138 5.2.1 Methods 138 5.2.2 Types of /r/ in Even 142 5.2.3 Results 146 5.3 Acoustic variation of /l/ in Even 157 5.3.1 Methods 157 5.3.2 Results 160 5.4 Allophonic variation between velar and uvular voiceless stops 167 5.5 Discussion 178 6 Discussion and conclusions 181 6.1 The question of the feature underlying vowel harmony 181 6.2 Disagreement between the results of the acoustic and the perception study 184 6.3 Near-mergers in Labov’s paradigm 187 iv Contents 6.4 Near-mergers as an explanation for the Even data 189 6.5 Consonantal cues in the dialect of the Bystraia district: possible change of the whole phonological system 201 6.6 Conclusions 204 Appendix 1 207 Appendix 2 209 Appendix 3 211 Appendix 4 212 Appendix 5 213 Appendix 6 214 Appendix 7 215 References 217 Summary 227 Samenvatting 229 Curriculum Vitae 231 v Acknowledgements I am obliged and grateful to so many people who helped me and supported me while I was working on my dissertation that it is just impossible to mention everyone here. But I would like to express my gratitude to the most important persons. First of all these are my supervisors Brigitte Pakendorf, Sven Grawunder, Silke Hamann and Paul Boersma. I am extremely grateful to Brigitte Pakendorf for introducing me to the Even people and for our joint fieldwork trips to the Bystraia district and Sebian-Küöl, for her generous scientific advice and psychological support throughout my PhD, for the innumerable skype sessions we had over the last years and for correcting my English, for her patience and for believing in me. I want to thank Sven Grawunder for allowing me to be a part of the phonetics team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, for his great practical help in my work, for the opportunity to pop by his office with burning questions almost any time, as well as for the collaborative work we carried out together. Many thanks go Silke Hamann and Paul Boersma for accepting me as an external PhD student at the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, for valuable discussion of my work on the different stages and for remote supervision. Silke Hamann was always ready to answer questions, and I am obliged to her for suggesting numerous changes and corrections, both substantial and minor. I am grateful to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology for hosting me, first within the Max Planck Research Group on Comparative Population Linguistics and later at the Department of Linguistics. To the Director of this department, Bernard Comrie, I am deeply indebted for his personal interest in my project. Crucially, this work would not be possible without the enthusiastic help of some Even people I met doing fieldwork. The people with whom I worked most are Rimma Maksimovna Egorova, the late Efim Innokentyevich Amganov, Valentina Innokentyevna Akhmetova, Vladimir Afanasyevich Cherkanov from the Bystraia district; Nadezhda Petrovna Zakharova, Tatyana Petrovna Krivoshapkina, Klim Klimovich Krivoshapkin, Mikhail Vasilyevich Krivoshapkin, Iya Vasilyevna Krivoshapkina from Sebian-Küöl; Ekaterina Afanasyevna Krivoshapkina from Yakutsk. Although data recorded in Topolinoe are not analyzed in this thesis I would nevertheless like to acknowledge the help of the following speakers: Tatyana Vasilyevna Zakharova, Nataliya Mikhaylovna Golikova and Avdokiya Mikhaylovna Lebedeva. During my stay in Leipzig I was lucky to meet many people discussions with whom influenced my work a lot. I am grateful to Bodo Winter, Leonardo Lancia and Natalie Fecher for conversations directly and indirectly connected to my dissertation. I am obliged to Michael Dannemann and Roger Mundry for numerous discussions of statistical analyses of my data. I would like to thank Sandro Vasiljevich Kodzasov, who unfortunately passed away in October 2014, and John Esling for listening to some of the vi Acknowledgements Even data I recorded and sharing their impressions. I am also grateful to the assistants in our DOBES project, Evgeniya Zhivotova and Luise Zippel, for fruitful discussions and practical help. A special thanks goes to Dejan Matić for supporting me at the initial stages of my work in Leipzig, for his course on Even grammar at the University of Leipzig, for introducing me to the Evens in Topolinoe and for sharing with me his observations on Even phonetics.