Lecture: Insights into the Interaction of Tone, Stress and Morphophonology in Wampis

A talk about the stress and tone system of Wampis (Jivaroan, Peru) within a Optimality Theory framework

This talk will be streamed online and shown in the indicated room.

This talk accounts for the tone and stress systems in Wampis, a Jivaroan (or Chicham)
language from the Peruvian Amazonia. Wampis presents several fascinating word-level
phenomena, such as vowel elision, vowel harmony, nasalization, and other different
morphophonological processes. The complex interplay between these word-level phenomena,
a strict phonotactic structure, and prosody results in extreme opacity (cf. Kiparsky 2000), as
seen in (1), and poses significant challenges for the analysis and description of languages like
Wampis.

(1) /hintinakaratinu/ - [hintíŋkartin] ‘teacher’
/paantamana/ - [paánman] ‘plantain (accusative)’

While this interaction between stress and tone has led to various categorizations of
other Jivaroan languages as having ‘pitch accent’, ‘tone-stress’, ‘accent’ or ‘stress’ systems
(Beasley & Pike 1957; Fast 1975; Payne 1990; Overall 2018), it is important to note that
Wampis has certain characteristics. Wampis has a single tone in a privative H/Ø system
(Hyman 2009) and exhibits three clearly distinct high-tone types – lexical, metrical and
grammatical – that interact with one another. Complex interactions between these different
tones, the stress system, vowel elision, and morphophonological processes result in variations
of word forms and their associated prosody. Working within an Optimality Theory framework
(Prince & Smolensky 1993; René 1997), I argue that the surface opacity found in Wampis
can be explained by the application of a set of word-formation constraints and faithfulness
constraints with respect to tone, rather than by the application of a large number of
morphological and phonological rules (Peña 2016). A better understanding of the phenomena
presented in Wampis is not only valuable for comprehending the interaction between tone and
stress systems but also for shedding light on broader typological and theoretical issues such
as word derivation order and prosody, in a region that, with few exceptions (Zimmermann
2013; Rose 2019), requires to be better understood typologically and theoretically. Moreover,
it contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the phonological aspects of
languages in general.

References:
Beasley, D. and Pike, K. L. (1957). Notes on Huambisa phonemics. Lingua Posnaniensis 6.
1-8.
Fast, Gerhart. (1975). Sistema fonológico del idioma Achual. Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de
Verano.
Hyman, Larry M. (2009). How (not) to do phonological typology: the case of pitch accent.
Language Sciences 31: 213-238.
Kager, René. (1997). Rhythmic vowel deletion in Optimality Theory. In Iggy Roca (Ed.),
Derivations and constraints in phonology, 463-99. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kiparsky, Paul (2000). Opacity and Cyclicity. The Linguistic Review 17. 351–67.
Liberman, Mark & Alan Prince. (1977). On stress and linguistic rhythm. Linguistic Inquiry 8:
249-336.
Overall, Simon. (2018). A Grammar of Aguaruna (Inniá Chicham). Berlin: De Gruyter.
Payne, David. (1990). Accent in Aguaruna. In Doris Payne (Ed.), Amazonian Linguistics:
Studies in Lowland South American Languages, 161-184. Austin: University of Texas
Press.
Peña, Jaime. (2016). A Grammar of Wampis. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Oregon.
Prince, Alan, and Paul Smolensky. (1993). Optimality Theory: Constraint interaction in
generative grammar. Technical report, Rutgers University Center for Cognitive
Science, New Brunswick, NK, and University of Colorado, Boulder.
Rose, Fraçoise. (2019). Rhythmic syncope and opacity in Mojeño Trinitario. Phonological
Data and Analysis 1: 1-25.
Zimmermann, Eva (2013). Vowel deletion as mora usurpation: the case of Yine. Phonology,
30(1), 125–16

Info

Day: 2023-10-26
Start time: 11:30
Duration: 00:25
Room: NIG Raum 1
Track: Phonetics and Phonology
Language: en

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