Abstract:Sahaptin is a Sahaptian language spoken in Washington and Oregon, U.S.A. Rigsby & Rude (1996) divide Sahaptin into three broad dialect areas: Northwest, Northeast, and Columbia River. This Illustration of the IPA reflects the Yakama (also spelled Yakima) subdialect (ykm) of Northwest Sahaptin. Sahaptin has fifty or fewer native speakers (Beavert & Jansen 2012). The second author is a native speaker of this dialect. Her voice is on the accompanying recordings.
“…Figure 4Examples of glottalization segmentation for two tokens in Northwest Sahaptin (Hargus & Beavert 2014). The left panel is [paˈʔaʃa] ‘they entered’, whose glottal stop shows full occlusion surrounded by irregular voicing; the right panel is [ˈlaʔajk] ‘sit relaxed’, whose glottal stop is realized only with irregular voicing.…”
Variation in voicing is common among sounds of the world’s languages: sounds that are analyzed as voiceless can undergo voicing, and those analyzed as voiced can devoice. Among voiceless glottal sounds in particular, voicing is widespread: linguists often expect the voiceless glottal stop [ʔ] and fricative [h] to be fully voiced, especially between vowels. In this study, we use audio recordings from Illustrations of the International Phonetic Alphabet published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association to explore the extent to which glottal consonants and non-modal (breathy and creaky) vowels differ in terms of percentage voicing and voicing intensity in three phrasal positions. We find that voiceless [h] is only slightly less voiced than voiced [ɦ] in initial position. Between two vowels, both [h] and [ɦ] are as voiced as breathy vowels. Glottal stops and creaky vowels are both characterized by high percentages of voicing, but they differ in voicing intensity: in all phrasal positions, glottal stops generally have periods of strong and weak voicing, whereas creaky vowels are strongly voiced. In contrast, vowels described as ‘rearticulated’, ‘checked’, or ‘glottalized’ show similar drops in voicing intensity to glottal stops. We interpret these results through an articulatory lens: glottal consonants and non-modal vowels are both modulations in phonation resulting from laryngeal constriction and vocal fold spreading. We argue further that, because voicing during [ʔ] and [h] is largely predictable from respiratory and prosodic constraints, many cases of [ʔ] and [h] can be considered phonetically underspecified for voicing.
“…Figure 4Examples of glottalization segmentation for two tokens in Northwest Sahaptin (Hargus & Beavert 2014). The left panel is [paˈʔaʃa] ‘they entered’, whose glottal stop shows full occlusion surrounded by irregular voicing; the right panel is [ˈlaʔajk] ‘sit relaxed’, whose glottal stop is realized only with irregular voicing.…”
Variation in voicing is common among sounds of the world’s languages: sounds that are analyzed as voiceless can undergo voicing, and those analyzed as voiced can devoice. Among voiceless glottal sounds in particular, voicing is widespread: linguists often expect the voiceless glottal stop [ʔ] and fricative [h] to be fully voiced, especially between vowels. In this study, we use audio recordings from Illustrations of the International Phonetic Alphabet published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association to explore the extent to which glottal consonants and non-modal (breathy and creaky) vowels differ in terms of percentage voicing and voicing intensity in three phrasal positions. We find that voiceless [h] is only slightly less voiced than voiced [ɦ] in initial position. Between two vowels, both [h] and [ɦ] are as voiced as breathy vowels. Glottal stops and creaky vowels are both characterized by high percentages of voicing, but they differ in voicing intensity: in all phrasal positions, glottal stops generally have periods of strong and weak voicing, whereas creaky vowels are strongly voiced. In contrast, vowels described as ‘rearticulated’, ‘checked’, or ‘glottalized’ show similar drops in voicing intensity to glottal stops. We interpret these results through an articulatory lens: glottal consonants and non-modal vowels are both modulations in phonation resulting from laryngeal constriction and vocal fold spreading. We argue further that, because voicing during [ʔ] and [h] is largely predictable from respiratory and prosodic constraints, many cases of [ʔ] and [h] can be considered phonetically underspecified for voicing.
“…The Yakima dialect of Sahaptin (ykm) (hereafter YS) has been described as a pitch accent language Beavert 2005, Hargus andBeavert 2014) with the properties summarized in (1). In this article we will bring to light new data from reduplicated verbs found in texts.…”
Section: Pitch Accentmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…An impediment to this view, in favor of the pitch accent analysis, is that word accent interacts with intonation. Declarative sentences are marked by a sentence-final boundary tone L, but this L does not occur when the sentence-final word ends in an accented syllable on a short vowel, 2 as in [tk w alá] 'freshwater fish' (Hargus and Beavert 2014), which can be viewed as a constraint against tonal crowding. A derivational approach to this analysis, showing underlying accent (marked as a͋ ) realized as H tone and word-final L boundary tone, is sketched out in (3) We wondered if such words indicated that a secondary stress is retained when stress shifts from root to suffix, but not when stress shifts from root to prefix.…”
Section: Interaction Of Lexical Prosody With Intonationmentioning
The Yakima dialect of Sahaptin has been described as a pitch accent language, but lately the category “pitch accent” has been questioned as a prosodic primitive. In this article we bring to light new data from reduplicated verbs found in texts. Trisyllabic and longer reduplicated verbs appear to have secondary stress, which is unexpected in a pitch accent language. We suggest that secondary stress surfaces in a PStem domain which meets certain minimal conditions of length. We conclude by sketching a two-dimensional typology of prosodic function with two scales, Word demarcation and Lexical contrast, and situate “canonical” stress, “canonical” tone and some in-between cases like Yakima Sahaptin within this typology.
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