Wednesday, December 6, 2006
6:00 pm at the home of Leanne Hinton

Speaker: Reiko Kataoka
Title: "Phonetics of three-way contrast in Paviotso medial stops"

Abstract:
Northern Paiute belongs to the Western Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family and is divided into two main dialect groups: the northern group or Oregon Northern Paiute (ONP) and the southern group or Nevada Northern Paiute (NNP) (Nichols 1966). Some of the southern dialects of the NNP (sNNP) including Paviotso, a dialect treated in current study, have a unique three-way distinction among medial obstruents: 'fortis', 'lenis', and what has been called by Numic specialists 'voiced fortis', while other Western Numic languages have only a two-way distinction in the corresponding obstruent sets (Liljeblad 1966, Nichols 1966, Norris 1986, Thornes 2003). Although the existence of this three-way contrast has been long recognized, a detailed study of their phonetic properties has not been available. Against this background, an acoustic study of Paviotso medial consonants was conducted.

In addition to providing detailed phonetic descriptions of the three-way contrast, the study has two more sub-goals. The first sub-goal is to assess the status of stops as 'fortis' and 'lenis'. Ladefoged and Maddieson (1997) acknowledge that the term 'fortis' is used to indicate greater respiratory or articulatory energy involved in the production of a segment; and the term 'lenis', less energy in both cases. Thus, the acoustic evidence for the 'fortis/lenis' status is of interest. The second sub-goal is to offer the alternative analysis to the historical sound change of medial consonants between Proto Numic (PN) and sNNP. Numic specialists agree that there was a nasal-stop sequence in PN, which corresponds to today's 'voiced fortis' in sNNP. However, the proposed sound change (*NC > CC[voiced]) is phonetically unmotivated in a sense that we would not expect, from physiological, aerodynamic, acoustic-auditory, and/or perceptual principles, for the nasal-stop sequence to have voiced fortis as its synchronic variation, while many sound changes have a parallel synchronic variation (Ohala 1993). This paper will present an alternative analysis: The acoustic evidence, phonetic constraints, and typology of sound change suggest that there is a great deal of possibility that 'voiced fortis' in sNNP resembles the proto Numic sound and nasal-stop sequence represents a newer form--a result of sound change.

Wednesday, October 4, 2006
6:00 pm at the home of Andrew Garrett

Speaker: Teresa McFarland
Title: "Verbal Affix Ordering in Filomeno Mata Totonac"

Wednesday, September 6, 2006
6:00 pm at the home of Leanne Hinton

Title: Reports on Summer Fieldwork