Abstract

The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

by

Teresa Ann McFarland

Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Sharon Inkelas, Chair

This dissertation constitutes a descriptive grammar of the phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac that highlights typologically unusual phenomena of theoretical interest. Filomeno Mata (FM) Totonac is a member of the Totonac-Tepehua family (eastern Mexico), spoken in and around the municipality whose name it borrows in the state of Veracruz. It is a polysynthetic, highly agglutinating, head-marking variety with VSO word order and complex verbal morphology that has not previously been described by linguists. This grammar is based on fieldwork conducted by the author between 2003 and 2009.

Some of the grammatical phenomena described herein which may be of interest to theoreticians and typologists include:

* Glottalization or aspiration and vowel devoicing to mark prosodic boundaries

* Postlexical nasal epenthesis at word-word and clitic-stem boundaries between a vowel and a stop or affricate

* Stress shift as a marker of interrogative utterances, which may occur on the verb or other sentencial elements

* A large set of ideophones marked by reduplication and sound symbolism in the categories of sound and manner of motion adverbials, colors, odors/flavors, and descriptive adjectives

* Complex inflectional combinatorics that feature long distance blocking, compositionality of certain person agreement markers, and glottalization and suppletion to mark second person subjects

* Typologically unusual free variation in the ordering of verbal morphemes in a middle zone of affixes on either side of the root, without scopal or semantic significance; mostly involving derivational affixes, but also including one inflectional prefix

* A gradient rather than categorical distinction between clitics and affixes, with the four relevant tests often giving conflicting results

* An unusually large number of object-related deverbal nominalization constructions, including agentive, locative, instrumental, purpose, and result nominalizations, as well as an unusual deverbal `ought to' construction.

The focus of this study is process morphology in Guébie, an endangered Kru language spoken in Côte d'Ivoire. Unlike many primarily affixing morphological systems, much of the morphology in Guébie involves root-internal phonological changes like tone shift and vowel replacement. For this reason, Guébie data have much to offer discussions of the interface between morphology and phonology. Based on the Guébie facts presented here, I argue 1) that process morphology, where a non-concatenative phonological process is the sole exponent of a morpheme, is a subtype of morphologically conditioned phonology, and 2) that not all morphology involves underlying phonological items. I conclude that whether a morpheme triggers a phonological process is independent of whether a morpheme is associated with underlying phonological content. Instead, morphologically conditioned phonological processes are driven by phonological constraints, whose rankings are determined by particular morphosyntactic features present in the domain being phonologically evaluated.

This study describes the phonology and morphology of Guébie, focusing in particular on three case studies of morphologically conditioned phonological processes. These include phonologically determined noun class agreement, scalar tone shift, and vowel replacement. In each of these case studies we see evidence for specific interactions between not only morphology and phonology, but also syntax and phonology. On the morphological side, Guébie tonal morphology shows us that not every morpheme is associated with an underlying (abstract) phonological item. With respect to syntax, we see that domains of phonological evaluation in Guébie must be larger than a single word, but not larger than a syntactic phase. We also see phonological processes sensitive to both morphosyntax and lexical class in Guébie, suggesting that any model of phonological grammar must be able to reference morphosyntactic and lexical information. By exploring morphological exponents across a language, we can narrow down the space of possible models that account for morphosyntactic interaction with phonology.

Child speech is highly variable. The speech apparatus—the vocal tract, tongue, teeth, and vocal folds—develop at different rates for different children, which helps explain some of the variability in children’s speech. For example, the ratio of the oral to pharyngeal cavities changes as children age, making it difficult to establish reliable articulatory routines (Smith and Goffman 1998; Vorperian et al. 2005). While anatomy does play this undeniable role in child speech development, this dissertation focuses instead on components in the child’s environment that may explain their speech patterns. To do so, the studies here report on speech development in bilingual children acquiring South Bolivian Quechua (henceforth “Quechua”) and Spanish in a mid-size town in Bolivia. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the environmental effect of Quechua’s linguistic structure on speech development while chapter 4 examines the role of quantity of language exposure.

Chapter 2 examines how a phonological factor - vowel inventory—interacts with speech devel- opment. In Quechua, there are just three phonemic and two allophonic vowels. Chapter 2 asks if vowel inventory size mitigates acoustic variability in children aged four through ten. The study finds that children as young as four approximate adult-like acoustic targets, suggesting that child speech variability is contingent upon the language being learned. Still, children do not necessarily speak like adults. Using these vowel data, chapter 2 additionally finds that the children vary greatly in their ability to articulatorily compensate for their vocal tract morphologies, potentially explaining some of the large amounts of between-speaker variation that characterizes child speech.

Chapter 3 examines how another aspect of Quechua’s linguistic structure - its highly agglutinat- ing morphology - may interact with speech development. In Quechua, speakers construct words by supplementing root morphemes with a series of grammatical suffixes. Chapter 3 asks if this word composition could interact with children’s coarticulatory patterns. Here coarticulation is quantified using two novel acoustic measures that are less susceptible to the challenges that the child vocal anatomy poses for traditional spectral analysis. In experiment 2 of chapter 3, these measures are validated on a large corpus of four-year-old children acquiring English.

The central results of chapter 3 demonstrate that children and adults distinguish coarticulatorily between word environments: within morpheme (e.g. papa ‘potato’) and between morpheme (e.g. papa-pi ‘potato-loc). However, only children compensate for the morphologically complex words’ prosodic structure by shortening word duration. As a result, it remains unclear if the children’s spoken language patterns better reflect morphological or prosodic structure.

Finally, chapter 4 asks how children’s language exposure and use—in Quechua or Spanish— predicts the speech production outcomes from chapters and 2 and 3. In this study, each child’s bilingual language use patterns are computed from daylong audio recordings of the children’s lan- guage environments. Employing random sampling to annotate the recordings, chapter 4 efficiently estimates the children’s bilingual language environments: the annotation method required an aver- age of just 90 minutes of language category annotation from each recording to effectively estimate each child’s dual language exposure.

The chapter finds that children’s language exposure and use does indeed predict their speech patterns: children with monolingual Quechua mothers have tighter, less variable vowel categories than children with bilingual Quechua-Spanish or Quechua-dominant mothers. Additionally, children who use more Quechua throughout the day tend to distinguish more between the morphological environments tested in chapter 4. This last finding indicates that the more Quechua these children use, the better they are at analyzing and breaking down morphologically complex words.

Overall, the results from this dissertation demonstrate how myriad factors relating to linguistic structure and quantity of language exposure predict child speech variation. In doing so, this work also demonstrates how understudied languages—and novel methodological techniques like child-friendly acoustic measures and daylong audio recordings—can reveal aspects of children’s psycholinguistic representations, addressing long-standing questions in the field. Thus, this dissertation concludes that children face anatomical obstacles, such as an unstable oral to pharyngeal cavity ratio, that explain some of their speech variability. However, these anatomical factors co-exist with numerous elements of the children’s everyday linguistic environments to predict speech development.