Selected topics in Nootka and Tubatulabal phonology.
Item
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Title
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Selected topics in Nootka and Tubatulabal phonology.
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Identifier
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AAI3083636
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identifier
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3083636
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Creator
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Aion, Nora Ellen.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Charles E. Cairns
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Date
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2003
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Linguistics
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Abstract
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This dissertation undertakes a phonological analysis of two Native-American languages: Tubatulabal, and Tseshaht, a dialect of Nootka. Phenomena in both languages make them ideal for evaluating competing phonological theories: extreme opacity in Tubatulabal, and stress exceptions in Tseshaht.;In Tseshaht, the word-initial foot has a unique standing. Each word has just one foot, the leftmost two syllables in the word. Several phonological processes, such as Stress-Assignment and Vowel Coalescence occur only within the foot. Furthermore, Tseshaht has what appears to be a three-way distinction in vowel length: short, long, and "variable". A variable-length vowel is long in either of the first two syllables of the word and is short in the third or later syllable of the word. Stress in Tseshaht falls on the first syllable, unless it is light and the second syllable is heavy, in which case the second syllable receives the stress. A heavy syllable in Tseshaht contains either a long vowel or a short vowel followed by a nasal. There are a number of exceptions to this stress rule in which stress is outside of the "foot". No previous analyses have satisfactorily accounted for these exceptions.;In Tubatulabal, every odd-numbered vowel, starting from the left, is subject to a lengthening rule. Productive vowel deletion rules in the phonology render both reduplication and alternate lengthening opaque. The vowel-lengthening rule is rendered opaque by virtue of the deletion of the middle syllable, which makes vowels lengthened by alternate lengthening adjacent. Previous theories use stipulations and arbitrary rules to handle such cases. Tubatulabal stress occurs on odd-numbered vowels, starting from the right; underlying long vowels and those lengthened by alternate lengthening are also stressed. These facts suggest a powerful argument against the OT notion of one-level, parallel-processing. A derivational approach is required because the result of alternate lengthening is the input to stress. Furthermore, OT is unable to account for the cases of extreme opacity mentioned above.;The three-dimensional metrical model of stress, adopted here, along with a serial rule-ordering framework helps further us in our goal of explanatory adequacy for these phenomena.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
