Glottalization and Lenition in Nuu-chah-nulth

Abstract

This article examines glottalization and lenition in Nuu-chah-nulth. These processes involve features introduced via affixation, features that are sometimes compatible with the final segment of the stem and sometimes incompatible. An understanding of the intricacies of these patterns requires a focus on featural representations, with lexical representations involving floating features and variable specifications for features. Both of these properties follow from the postulation of a rich base, with features freely combining in inputs. The analysis argues for covert features, for constraints holding more strongly in small domains than large domains, and for the importance of a markedness scale on glottalizability.

The subsegmental structure of German plural allomorphy

“…Note that the novel, purely phonological, explanation for Generalization I provide here is essentially parallel to classical analyses of floating featural affixes such as labialization in Chaha (Akinlabi 1996;Rose 1997Rose , 2007, where the same morphemic material can show up in different segmental positions in a word according to phonological well-formedness conditions (see also Zoll 1996 andKim andPulleyblank 2009 for cases of glottalization which alternate with full glottal segments). In Sect.…”

Phonemic vs. derived glides

“…Well-known examples include the neutral vowels found in many harmony systems where some trigger front-and others back-vowel harmony. A more recent example of this type of phenomenon is found in Nuu-chah-nulth (previously referred to as Nootka) where two classes of phonologically distinct fricatives, which are phonetically identical, exist (Kim and Pulleyblank, 2004). Their OT analysis explains the dual behavior of fricatives in morphological environments triggering glottalization and lenition.…”

Second Language Processing and Linguistic Theory

“…Howe & Pulleyblank's (2004) analysis of the preferential preservation of the glottal gesture in stops and the preferential glottalization of sonorants results in their calim that faithfulness between input and output is maximally satisfied when the perceptual salience of the target segment is prime. These differential patterns are explained by positing the existence of a harmonic relationship between glottalised sonorants and obstruents, as illustrated in (9): (9) Harmonic scale among ejectives CG/STOP  CG/SON Kim & Pulleyblank (2009) argue for a further elaboration of the scale in (9) in order to formalize the crosslinguistic marked status of ejective fricatives. It is also important to observe that these authors explicitly assume that both ejective stops and affricates "are the least marked category" (2009: 578); however, Maddieson (1984) observes that "ejective affricates occur only in those systems containing glottalic stops (almost exclusively ejectives)" (1984: 109), whereas the reverse pattern is not attested.…”