Sgaw Karen papers Presented to Nimrod Andrew Papers written for the course LIN 4370/7911 Field Methods (Fall 2010) Instructor: Marc Brunelle University of Ottawa April 2011 2 Foreword This volume is a collection of papers written by the students of a Field Methods course on Sgaw Karen that took place at the University of Ottawa in the Fall 2010. The goal of the course was to uncover as much as possible about the grammar of Sgaw Karen with the help of a native speaking consultant, Nimrod Andrew. During the first half of the semester, students had to figure out the basic grammatical structure of the language (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics), without consulting grammars or previous academic work. During the second half of the semester, students had to choose individual topics and to explore them through individual elicitation sessions with Nimrod Andrew and consultation of pre-existing scholarly resources. The papers presented here are the result of this work. As the scope and difficulty of the topics and the level of the students (both undergraduate and graduate) greatly vary, some are more exploratory while others are exhaustive and almost publishable papers (a few students also chose not to include their papers in this volume). They are organized by sub-discipline and all begin with a short abstract that provides the reader with a non-technical summary of the content. In my own name and in the name of all the students, I want to express my appreciation and gratitude to Nimrod Andrew. The course would not have been possible without his dedication, hard work and sharp intuitions. More importantly, his love of the language, his enthusiastic attitude and his unrelenting patience made this project an enjoyable and stimulating endeavour for all those who took part in it. Marc Brunelle Course instructor May 31, 2011 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Phonetics ON THE THREE -WAY PLOSIVE CONTRAST OF SGAW KAREN ............................................................ 5 Dominike Thomas and Leonardo Alves-Soares TONE AND PHONATION TYPES IN SGAW KAREN .............................................................................. 25 Joshua Finkeldey Morphology and Phrasal Syntax STRUCTURAL AND PROSODIC SIMILARITIES BETWEEN COMPOUNDS AND LEXICALIZED PHRASES IN SGAW KAREN .................................................................................................................................. 36 Jeffrey Wong CLASSIFIERS IN SGAW KAREN ......................................................................................................... 45 Guilherme Cervo LA SYNTAXE ET LA SÉMANTIQUE DES CLASSIFICATEURS NUMÉRAUX EN KAREN SGAW .................. 51 Jean-Bruno Chartrand NEGATION IN KAREN SGAW ............................................................................................................ 59 Catherine Gibb ADVERBS OF INTENSITY IN SGAW KAREN ....................................................................................... 65 Muna Nassri SERIAL VERB CONSTRUCTIONS IN SGAW KAREN : A COMPARISON OF KARENIC VP STRUCTURES .. 76 Meredith Lucey-Weinhold 4 Sentence Syntax and Information Structure SUBORDINATION AND COORDINATION IN KAREN SGAW ................................................................. 85 Cassandra Chapman 5 THE [NE ] PARTICLE AND ITS ROLE IN A TOPIC -PROMINENT INTERPRETATION OF KAREN SGAW ...... 97 Hugo St-Amant Lamy 5 ANALYSIS OF THE PARTICLE NE IN SGAW KAREN : A MINIMALIST APPROACH TO PRAGMATICS . 110 Nahed Mourad Text THE TALE OF KINOLE AND NOMIE ................................................................................................. 118 Transcription by Dominike Thomas and Marc Brunelle 5 On the Three-Way Plosive Contrast of Sgaw Karen Dominike Thomas Leonardo Alves-Soares Sgaw Karen, a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Burma, is traditionally described as having a three-way aspiration contrast in plosive consonants (Abramson 1995:155, Gilmore 1898:5). This contrast consists of voiced unaspirated plosives ([b, d]), unvoiced unaspirated plosives ([p, t, k]) and unvoiced aspirated plosives ([p h, t h, k h]). Abramson (1995), the only other acoustic study on the subject, studied this contrast, in Pwo and Sgaw Karen, in isolated words and with very few tokens. This paper aims to further investigate the three-way contrast in Sgaw Karen, with an experiment designed for a statistical analysis of tokens in a carrier phrase. 1.0 Introduction Sgaw Karen is a Sino-Tibetan language, belonging to the Tibeto-Burman branch, spoken in Burma (Abramson 1995: 156). Like other dialects of Karen (Phillips 2009 and Kato 1995 for different dialects of Pwo Karen), it is traditionally described as having a three-way contrast in plosives (Abramson 1995: 155, Gilmore 1898: 5). This contrast consists of voiced unaspirated plosives ([b, d]), unvoiced unaspirated plosives ([p, t, k]) and unvoiced aspirated plosives ([p h, t h, kh]). The velar sound [k] is not phonologically voiced (Abramson 1995: 156). This contrast differs from the two-way contrast found in English. Gilmore (1898: 5) specifies that Karen has sounds that are "intermediate between p and b" and "between t and d". Only one study (as far as we know) has been done acoustically regarding this three-way contrast in Karen. Abramson (1995) studied and compared the VOT (voice onset time) values of plosives in isolated words of Pwo Karen and Sgaw Karen. He was able to conclude that there is, indeed, a three-way contrast. VOT values for voiced consonants were negative, while the VOT values for aspirated plosives were much higher than for plain plosives. VOT values were therefore sufficient to delimit voiced, unaspirated and aspirated plosives (1995: 163). However, Abramson's (1995) study was mostly limited to words in citation forms, with very few tokens (sometimes as few as 1 per category). We therefore designed this experiment to further investigate the three-way contrast in Sgaw Karen. Our experiment placed Karen words into in a carrier phrase. We decided to utilize such configuration so that we could properly assess the statistical significance of our results. 6 2.0 Methods Our subject is a 27 year-old native speaker of Sgaw Karen who immigrated to Canada 6 years ago. He speaks English (which he learned in a refugee camp), Burmese (which he learned in school), and a little bit of Thai (learned informally) as second languages. Despite not having formal linguistic education, he teaches Karen and has also taken courses on second language teaching. We met the speaker in Field Methods (LIN7911, Fall 2010), a linguistics class offered to both graduate and advanced undergraduate students at the University of Ottawa in which we had to decipher the basic grammar of the Karen language. For this study, we designed a word list based on class transcriptions of isolated words. This list included words with aspirated, plain, and voiced plosives. Initially, we had also included aspirated and plain alveo-dental fricatives. However, due to perception issues, our transcriptions of words containing such sounds were not always correct, and we decided not to use them in our experiment. Our participant corrected our word list and provided us with a Karen orthographic transcription, but due to time constraints, we were not able to re-organize the list in a more balanced way. The words from the word list were included in a carrier phrase 'Say X again' in Karen ([t ɛ ... kə dɔ tə bl ɔ]). The speaker's task was therefore to say the meaning of the word in English, the word in isolation in Karen, and the word in the carrier phrase in Karen. The target word is the only variable word in the sentence, whereas we used the word [t ɛ] as a reference word to offset any inter-sentence variation. Recordings were made in a sound booth using a Shure KSM44 microphone (positioned a few inches away from the mouth on a microphone stand) and a Symetrix SX202 dual mic preamp. A Mac Pro (Session 1) or Mac Book Pro (Session 2) was used, with Audacity, to record the sessions. The recordings were made in two different sessions, with some differences: both sessions were done in two different sound booths, and the first session made use of a Mac Pro while the second session was recorded on a Mac Book Pro. These differences are not thought to negatively affect our VOT measurements. The recordings were then analyzed using Praat, a recording software used to analyze speech. The word [t ɛ] was chosen as a reference word in order to calculate the effect of speech rate on segment duration. The closure and aspiration durations for the target words were divided by the duration of the reference word. As such, if the speech rate for a sentence was higher, both the target word and the reference word would be shorter, but the ratio would stay the same as for a sentence spoken more slowly. The reference word duration (from release of the closure to the start of the following vowel) was segmented using Praat. The closure and aspiration part of the target sounds were also segmented in the same way, as shown in Figure 1: 7 Figure 1 - Segmented sound file in Praat (sap hokop ho, 'animal') The segments are represented by the blue lines. Reference word was coded (or identified) as 'r', sibilant [s] was coded as 's', the closure was coded as the segment +c (here, pc and kc), and the aspiration was coded as segment +a (here, pa and ka). After coding was done, we used a Praat script to extract the duration values for the VOT tier. These values were imported into Excel, where the duration ratios were calculated and transformed into milliseconds,