Abstract
In this chapter I provide an overview of the basic phonological structure of Coatzospan Mixtec. This serves two purposes. First, it provides the reader with an understanding of the morpheme structure and segmental contrasts of the language. Secondly, it supplies the necessary context for the analyses of the two prosodies-glottalization and nasalization-in Chapters 3 and 4, respectively. With this in mind, the chapter is structured as follows. In §2.1, I characterize the canonical shape of CM morphemes. In §2.2 and §2.3, I motivate the respective consonant and vowel contrasts of the language. §2.4 contains a detailed discussion of palatalization, an important element of the segmental phonology of CM. And in §2.5 I conclude with a summary.
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It is interesting to note that for CVV morphemes in which V1 and V2 are distinct, all of the synchronic forms for which I have found corresponding Proto-Mixtec reconstructions in Josserand (1982) are diachronically derived from couplets containing a medial glide, e.g.: Josserand’s reconstructions show that some CVV couplets containing identical vowels are also diachronically derived from proto-forms containing medial consonants, as in kii‘go out’ *keyi above. They need not be so derived, however, as can be seen by ndoo ‘sugar cane’ *ndoo7
Following Hyman (1993), I assume that the TBU is the mora. Clements (1984) argues that the syllable is the TBU in Kikuyu. However, as Hyman points out, one can also interpret such data as an indication that only the head mora of a syllable can bear tone, i.e. that there can be non-tonal moras. See also Steriade (1991) for related discussion of non-nuclear moras.
None of the analyses in subsequent chapters will rest crucially on this point.
Macaulay and Salmons (1995) independently reach a similar conclusion regarding the status of couplets in Mixtec in general. For them, couplets across the Mixtec language are viewed as being comprised of two vocalic timing slots, though they take no position on whether these are best viewed as skeletal positions, moras, or syllables.
The reader will doubtless notice that in most of the forms used in the chapter, consonant contrasts are exhibited in initial position of CV(7)V morphemes. There are two reasons for this. First, as Pike and Small (1974) note, initial position in the couplet is where all of the consonantal contrasts in the language are exhibited. Many of the less common consonants either rarely or never surface as the second consonant of a CVCV couplet. Secondly, in searching for minimal pairs, I have attempted to use the simplest structures possible, i.e. CVV or CV?V couplets, to probe for minimally distinct forms by varying the vowel quality. If there were a complete dictionary of CM morphemes, a more finely grained look at contrast in both possible consonant positions of couplets would have been possible. At this point, however, I view the lists here as contributing towards the building of a larger list of CM couplets.
See Chapter 1 for a discussion of the technique used for making the palatograms.
Recall that vowels are predictably nasalized after, but not before, nasal consonants (cf. (10c), (11a-c). This phenomenon is addressed in detail in Chapter 4.
This picture of contact for ist is representative of all three speakers (two male and one female) from whom I gathered palatographic data.
Unfortunately, Josserand’s (1982) list of Mixtec cognates does not include either of these morphemes. Thus, we cannot compare them with corresponding forms in other varieties of Mixtec to see if they have been either borrowed or are the result of a diachronic process of morpheme fusion.
I have also heard examples of this palatalization in the speech of a couple of young, male children—presumably due to the influence of the mother’s speech. I asked one consultant if this was unusual, and she informed me that many young boys often use some women’s speech forms but that they soon “learn” that this is not the correct way for them to speak.
Following Hayes (1989), an alternative to (44) could be a representation in which glides are represented underlyingly as non-moraic vowels, as in [kuawl instead of [kwaµµ]. Nothing crucial rests on this difference for the purposes of the discussion here. For example, assuming that the glide [w] is underlyingly represented as a non-moraic /u/ would still leave the question of why we find no surface forms such as *[waa].
It is interesting to note that the same consultant from whom the spectrograms above are taken provided me with the following pair of forms which she claimed were minimally distinct: [kwaa] ‘afternoon’ vs. [kua] ‘to get bitter’. Her intuitions were that the distinction between these resided in a distinction between an off-glide release of the velar stop in the former and the presence of an /u/ vowel in the latter. Despite her intuitions, however, I hesitate to include this pair as evidence in favor of the complex segment approach, because I have thus far been unable to convince myself that spectrographic evidence from her speech clearly confirms her intuition. I thus leave further work with this pair and the hunt for other such possible minimal pairs for future work with CM speakers.
Although it might be, I do not feel that this is simply a case of interspeaker variation. Though the recording above was not taken from one of the consultants who worked with Small and Pike on their original paper, I have checked her pronunciation of this form with one of Pike and Small’s (1974) consultants (Dolores Acosta Campos), and, to my ear, she pronounced it in the same manner as I have transcribed it here.
Though it is not incorrect to characterize CM as containing five contrastively nasal vowels, such a characterization fails to capture the whole story. Specifically, although it is not possible to predict a priori which morphemes will contain an underlyingly nasal vowel, the distribution of contrastively nasal vowels within a morpheme is predictable. In this sense, contrastive vowel nasalization is best seen as a lexical property of individual morphemes. This issue is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4.
Hume (1992) distinguishes between these two types of palatalization cross-linguistically by calling the affrication process coronalization,while reserving the term palatalization for the addition of a secondary [il articulation.
I take the term corner from Keating (1991), who treats the alveolar ridge as the whole area from the upper teeth to the point where the hard palate begins to angle sharply upwards. The corner is this turning point. See also Catford (1988) for discussion of this issue and Recasens (1990) for a slightly different descriptive perspective.
A more detailed autosegmental analysis is presented in Gerfen (1995).
The geometry of Clements and Hume (1995) is somewhat distinct from that of Hume (1992), but these differences do not affect this discussion.
Women’s speech palatalization is unaffected by vowel nasality.
The effect of contrastive /0/ on a preceding Ind/ is more difficult to discern due to the fact that the language generally prohibits the cooccurrence of prenasalized stops and contrastively nasalized vowels within morphemes (see Chapter 4). In one form, ndiûOi ‘honey’, the prenasalized stop surfaces as palatalized before a lexically nasalized /0/. This suggests that the effect might be limited to underlying It/. However, the presence of palatalization in ndii01 may receive a diachronic explanation in that this form may have arisen from the fusion of /ndute/ ‘water’ and /PM/ ‘sweet’. Thus, one might argue that the presence of palatalization on the stop constitutes a fossilized remnant of its realization before the non-nasal /u/ of /ndutef.
One might claim that the data motivate an analysis in which lexically nasal /0/ is unspecified for [+high]. As Diana Archangeli has pointed out, this may be attributable to the lack of a contrastively nasalized /ó/. However, such underspecification may constitute simply a strategy of shifting the location of arbitrariness in the treatment of the phenomenon. Assuming, say, that [+high] is the assimilating feature, why is lût unspecified for [high], while N is not? See Steriade (1995) for a discussion of general problems of this type for underspecification; also Inkelas (1994) for criticism of underspecification within Optimality Theory.
Forms such as ku7utiü ‘you will hoe’ clearly suggest that level-ordering within lexical phonology plays an important role here (cf. Kiparsky 1982, 1985, Mohanan 1982, Pulleyblank 1986, Kaisse and Shaw 1985, among others). I cite such forms merely to show that there is no absolute prohibition against the surfacing of palatalized stops before nasal [ú].
The one exception to this is the transcription of tone. The tone sandhi of the language is highly complex, and I have chosen not to transcribe the tones of most forms, given that further fieldwork is needed before I feel that I will be able to do so with confidence. Chapter 3 makes some mention of tone within the context of the discussion of glottalization. However, the reader is referred to the transcriptions in Pike and Small (1974) for an overview of the tone system, as well as to Gerfen and Denisowski (1998) for preliminary acoustic data on tone realization in isolation forms.
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Gerfen, C. (1999). A Phonological Sketch. In: Phonology and Phonetics in Coatzospan Mixtec. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 48. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2620-7_2
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