Rhythmic syncope and opacity in Mojeño Trinitario

Abstract

This paper presents rhythmic syncope in Mojeño Trinitario, an Arawak language spoken in lowland Bolivia. In this language, every vowel that is in a weak prosodic position can syncopate. The syncope pattern of Mojeño Trinitario is remarkable for several reasons. First, it involves a regular, categorical and complete deletion rather than a statistical reduction of vowels. Second, it applies similarly to words with either of two stress patterns: iambic words, which make up the great majority of words, and trochaic ones, much less numerous. Third, a great variety of consonant sequences are the result of syncope, and syllabification applies again after syncope. Fourth, rhythmic syncope actually underapplies: almost half of the vowels that are in a position to syncopate are maintained, and vowel quality plays a statistical role in immunity to syncope. Fifth, due to a rich morphology and a set of complex phonotactic rules applying sequentially, syncope leads to extreme opacity. The data presented in this paper in a theory-neutral way contribute to the typology of rhythmic syncope. It will also be of interest to phonologists considering constraint-based vs. derivational models of phonology.

Comparative Reconstruction of Proto-Mojeño and the Diversification of Mojeño Dialects

“…The topic of diachronic syncope in the Trinitario dialect is the most complex one discussed here. We argue, in section 3.4, that Rose's (2008Rose's ( , 2014Rose's ( , 2017 hypothesis relating the operation of these reductive developments in the language and the prosodic system of 'a previous stage of language' is essentially correct. We show that reconstructing tentatively for PM an accentual system virtually identical to the one attested for the Ignaciano variety offers a more precise and empirically-grounded formulation to her account, even though, unsurprisingly, exceptional forms and apparent counterexamples -the nature of which is explicitly discussed -remain.…”

“…Sparse reference is also made to Ott & Ott (1959), an early report on the phonology of this dialect. For the extant Trinitario variety, we relied on Gill (1957Gill ( , 1970, recent papers by Rose (2014Rose ( , 2015aRose ( , 2015bRose ( , 2017 as well as Rose's extensive Trinitario corpus. For Old Mojeño we relied on the existing documentation of the 17 th and 18 th century variety of Mojeño known as 'Old Mojeño'.…”

“…Now, for the back fricative often likened to the Spanish jota (and, accordingly, represented as <j> in most practical orthographies), there is a difference of phonetic realization between Trinitario and Ignaciano. Ott & Ott (1959: 4) describe the fricative h of Ignaciano as a glottal, while Rose (2017) describes an allophony between a velar and a glottal fricative. Interestingly, Rose's description seems to resonate with Marbán's description of Old Mojeño <h>, explicitly described as close to a velar fricative (Marbán 1702: 1).…”

“…In this section we will try to provide a comprehensive and unified approach to historical syncope in Trinitario, relying, to a large extent, on the synchronic descriptions of morphophonological V ~ ∅ alternations in this variety and its close interaction with the language's prosodic system (Rose 2017). The PM reconstructions proposed here and the implied developments of these etyma in Trinitario are entirely consistent with the diachronic account of Trinitario syncope proposed in Rose (2008;2014: 377-379), the sole difference being that we explicitly identify what she calls 'a past stage of the language' (Rose 2015b: 69) with PM and that we rely systematically on descriptions of the prosodic systems of the modern varieties for inferring the likely proto-system.…”

“…Due to the loss of the prefix vowel, the word ends up having its initial syllable accented. Synchronically, it is possible to postulate for this Ignaciano word an underlying form /nuˈapera/, which surfaces as [ˈnapera] after loss of the prefix vowel, accounting for the exceptional wordinitial accentuation by ordering the default accent placement rule before the rule of prefix vowel elision (as seen below, a virtually identical analysis is offered by Rose (2017) for Trinitario hiatus resolution). In (c), the third person masculine prefix ma-does not have its vowel elided, thus surfacing with a diphthong.…”