The phonetic correlates of Southern Ute stress

Abstract

Endangered languages are in need of urgent documentation. Following the phonetic tradition of Ladefoged and Maddieson, this chapter reports results of the first phonetic instrumental analysis of stress in Southern Ute, a severely endangered Uto-Aztecan language. The phonetic correlates of stress could include changes in duration, pitch and/or intensity (Ladefoged 2006). This analysis is based on a list of 100 words designed to determine the phonetic correlates of stress. Five speakers (three female and two male) were recorded using a frame sentence to control intonation. Stress placement data was elicited from one male and one female speaker. This prosodic information forms the basis of revitalization and documentation efforts as well as further phonological investigation.

Phonetics of Southern Ute vowels

“…Speech tokens came from a translation task, which made it possible to elicit data from the speakers who were not literate in the language. Speakers were presented with 202 English words or short phrases from the list in Oberly (2008) that contains various sound sequences possible in Southern Ute 3 . The words were presented orally one word at a time, and speakers were asked to translate them into Southern Ute and produce them both in isolation and in a carrier sentence ( Maas taani …máyku /ˈmaːs ˈtaːni, …ˈmajku/ ‘He always says …’).…”

“…The list includes items with the regular stress placement on the second vowel when the first vowel is short (5a, b), irregular stress on the initial short vowel (5c, d), and regular stress on the initial long vowel (5e, f). The full list of stimulus items can be found in Oberly (2008).…”

“…Similar to other Native American languages, published and unpublished work on the grammar of Southern Ute is exceedingly rare. It consists mainly of three dictionaries (Goss 1961, Charney 1996, Givón 2016), a grammar book (Givón 2011), a doctoral dissertation (Oberly 2008), and one journal article (Oberly & Kharlamov 2015). 1 Two of the dictionaries (Charney 1996, Givón 2016) and the grammar (Givón 2011) provide limited summaries of the sound inventory that are based primarily on Givón’s impressionistic transcriptions made during conversations with tribal elders in the 1970s and 1980s.…”

“…Charney (1996) and Givón (2011, 2016) also focus heavily on orthography as each author advocates a specific writing system. The dissertation (Oberly 2008) presents a pilot phonetic study of the Southern Ute sound system that is based on a subset of the dataset used in the current study (selected tokens from four of the eight speakers). The only previously published instrumental phonetic study (Oberly & Kharlamov 2015) addresses a specific phenomenon of vowel devoicing and does not examine other patterns or contrasts.…”

The syntax of wh-questions in unaccusative and (Un)ergative structures in Mehri language: A Phase-based approach

“…Mehri is a minority-endangered language spoken in Eastern Yemen by more than 250,000 speakers, particularly in Al-Mahrah region. It is also spoken in southern Oman (Dhofar), parts of central-southern and eastern Saudi Arabia, and in diasporic communities in parts of the Arab Gulf and eastern Africa [ 1 – 6 ]. As a sub-group of the Semitic language family (which is a branch of Afroasiatic family), Mehri is the most spoken of the Modern South Arabian languages (MSALs) in the present Arabian Peninsula.…”