PROSODIC PHONOLOGY IN OKLAHOMA CHEROKEE by SAMANTHA CORNELIUS Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON August 2018 PROSODIC PHONOLOGY IN OKLAHOMA CHEROKEE The members of the Committee approve the doctoral dissertation of SAMANTHA CORNELIUS Joseph Sabbagh Supervising Professor Colleen Fitzgerald Cynthia Kilpatrick Karin Michelson Dean of the Graduate School Copyright ⃝c by SAMANTHA CORNELIUS 2018 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my committee. Dr. Joseph Sabbagh has pushed me to not settle for the superficial answer as I have developed this project over the years. He always makes me think of the data in ways I haven't considered and for that I am very grateful. I would also like to thank Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald, who has always supported me and believed in me. She introduced me to fieldwork, the Cherokee language, and working with indigenous communities. Her mentorship from afar has been invaluable both for this project, and my development as a scholar. I am grateful to Dr. Cynthia Kilpatrick who helped me develop the analysis presented in this dissertation and provide motivation through the last few months of writing. Thank you so much for letting me pop in your office and bounce ideas off you! I am also grateful to Dr. Karin Michelson. One of my goals in writing this dissertation was to discuss Cherokee as it relates to Northern Iroquoian languages. Achieving this goal would have been impossible without consultation her. Her depth of knowledge of Oneida and other Northern Iroquoian languages helped me make links between Cherokee and its related languages that haven't been discussed before. I am deeply indebted to Cherokee Nation and the Cherokee Language Program man- ager Roy Boney. Thank you Roy for helping me coordinate visits and allowing me to take over part of the translation office, as well as supporting my research. I cannot begin to ex- press my gratitude to the Cherokee speakers who took the time to share their language and experiences with me: David Crawler, John Ross, Dennis Sixkiller, Anna Sixkiller, Ed Fields, Lawrence Panther, and Durbin Feeling. The dissertation could not have been completed without the knowledge and expertise of native speakers, and I am extremely grateful to have worked with such kindhearted and welcoming speakers. I would also like to thank my fellow graduate students at University of Texas at Arling- ton, who have heard seen so many versions of this and still given me substantial comments iv and suggestions. I also must thank Dr. Gordon Birrell, a person with whom I can talk about anything. I will always appreciate the time we spent together talking about language, literature, and so much more. I don't think I'd be a linguist without his encouragement and our shared enthusiasm for language. The research for this dissertation could not have been completed without financial support, and so I must also thank the organizations that have funded my work: American Philosophical Society Philips Fund for Native American Research, Jerold A. Edmondson Research Endowment in Linguistics, UTA University Sustainability Committee Grant for Documenting Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and 2014 Institute on Collaborative Lan- guage Research(InField/CoLang) grant #BCS-1263939. Finally, I must thank my husband, Mark. He never thought that I couldn't do this, and he's been with my every step of the way. Without Mark's patience, unwavering support, and profound belief in me, this dissertation could not have been completed. August 24, 2018 v ABSTRACT PROSODIC PHONOLOGY IN OKLAHOMA CHEROKEE SAMANTHA CORNELIUS, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Arlington, 2018 Supervising Professor: Joseph Sabbagh In this dissertation, I provide an analysis for word level prosody in Cherokee, a South- ern Iroquoian language spoken in Northeastern Oklahoma and Western North Carolina. Focusing on Cherokee as it is spoken in Oklahoma, I analyze right edges of Cherokee words, showing that the boundary tone is predictable, though its distribution is conditioned by lexical tonal phonology and other word-final phenomena. In order to account for the distribution of the boundary tone, I must first provide an analysis of lexical tone in Cherokee. There have been previous comprehensive tone analyses (Lindsey 1985; Wright 1996; Uchihara 2013), which argue for a tonal inventory with two underlying tones (high and lowfall), a superhigh accent, and a default low which does not interact with the tonal phonology. I summarize these previous analyses and discuss what generalizations they can and cannot account for. I also argue that some low pitches in Chero- kee are the surface realization of an underlying low tone. By including an underlying low tone in the tonal inventory of Cherokee, problematic surface pitch sequences from previous research can be explained. Before analyzing the boundary tone, I show all possible syllable shapes and discuss Word-Final Vowel Deletion, an optional fast speech process which often results in non- vi canonical word-final codas. I argue that there is a prosodic word which maps to a mor- phosyntactic word, as well as a larger prosodic word which includes enclitics. I also describe clitic linearization and attachment, and discuss how Cherokee clitics show a number of ty- pologically unusual properties. Finally, I describe all possible alignments of the boundary tone. While mentions of the boundary tone in previous literature claim that the boundary tone only appears on word- final vowels, I show a much wider range of possible surface positions for the boundary tone: 1) the boundary tone appears on a word-final vowel, 2) the boundary tone appears on a non word-final vowel, and 3) the boundary tone does not appear at all. I use a Stratal OT framework to account for the alignment of the boundary tone, as well as interactions between the surface position of the boundary tone and lexical tonal phonology, clitic attachment, and Word-Final Vowel Deletion. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . iv ABSTRACT . vi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS . xii LIST OF TABLES . xiv Chapter Page 1. INTRODUCTION . 1 1.1 Introduction . 1 1.2 The Cherokee Language . 1 1.2.1 Phonology . 2 1.2.2 Morphology . 6 1.2.3 Word Order and Syntax . 10 1.3 Choosing a Writing System . 12 1.3.1 Cherokee Syllabary . 12 1.3.2 Aspiration . 15 1.3.3 Long and short vowels . 17 1.3.4 Writing Tone . 18 1.4 Data sources . 20 1.5 Organization . 21 2. CHEROKEE PITCH AND TONE ANALYSES . 23 2.1 Introduction . 23 2.2 Accent v. Tone . 23 2.3 Cherokee Pitch Melodies . 27 viii 2.3.1 Superhigh . 35 2.3.2 Boundary Tone . 37 2.4 Tone Systems . 37 2.5 Analysis 1: Six Tones . 39 2.6 Analysis 2: High Tone Analyses . 39 2.6.1 Analysis 2a: Lindsey 1985 . 40 2.6.2 Analysis 2b: Wright 1996 . 42 2.6.3 Analysis 2c: Uchihara 2013 . 45 2.7 Summary of Previous Analyses . 48 3. THE LOW TONE IN CHEROKEE . 51 3.1 Introduction . 51 3.2 The Typology of Low Syllables . 51 3.3 The Case for Specified Low Tone . 53 3.3.1 Low Tone and Phonetic Contours . 54 3.3.2 Specified Low and Phonetic Contours . 61 3.3.3 Specified Low Tone and Short Vowels . 69 3.4 Unspecified Low . 71 3.5 Summary . 72 4. CHEROKEE SYLLABLES AND WORD-FINAL VOWEL DELETION . 74 4.1 Introduction . 74 4.1.1 How to Know Where Syllables Begin and End . 75 4.2 The Canonical Syllable . 77 4.2.1 Onsets . 77 4.2.2 Nucleus . 87 4.2.3 Codas . 88 4.3 Word Margins and Word-final Vowel Deletion . 90 ix 4.3.1 Vowel Deletion resulting in consonant-final forms . 92 4.3.2 Vowel Deletion resulting in vowel-final forms . 95 4.3.3 What Doesn't Delete . 99 4.3.4 Why WFVD must be a Deletion Process . 101 4.4 WFVD as a Prosodic Process . 103 4.4.1 What's going on with laryngeals? . 107 4.5 WFVD with Clitics . 110 4.5.1 The Status of the Yes/No Clitic =sgo .................. 112 4.6 Summary . 114 5. CLITICS . 116 5.1 Introduction . 116 5.2 Cherokee clitics . 117 5.2.1 Distribution of Cherokee Clitics . 119 5.3 Defining `clitic' . 120 5.3.1 Simple and Special Clitics . 121 5.4 Clitics in Northern Iroquoian languages . 123 5.4.1 Northern Iroquoian Simple Clitics . 123 5.4.2 Northern Iroquoian Special Clitics . 125 5.5 Linearization . 127 5.5.1 Second Position Clitics: 2W and 2D . 128 5.5.2 Clitic Syntax and the Expanded CP . 131 5.5.3 Syntactic approaches to linearization . 134 5.5.4 A strong phonological approach to linearization . 135 5.5.5 Prosodic Inversion . 140 5.6 Summary . 147 6. BOUNDARY TONE . 148 x 6.1 Introduction . 148 6.2 The Boundary Tone . 150 6.2.1 H% v. HL% . 152 6.3 The Boundary Tone and WFVD . 154 6.4 The Boundary Tone and Clitics . 156 6.4.1 Boundary Tone Alignment and Clitics with Underlying Tone . 159 6.4.2 WFVD and Clitics =sgo/=hn´o´o ..................... 166 6.5 Summary . ..