Francesco Burroni, Sireemas Maspong, Pimthip Kochaiyaphum, and Pittayawat Pittayaporn presented a paper titled "A new look at Pattani Malay Initial Geminates: A statistical and machine learning approach" at the 34th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 2020), held virtually October 24-26, 2020.

Francesco and Sireemas' paper was co-authored with Dr. Pittayawat Pittayaporn (a Cornell Phonetics Lab alumnus) and grad student Pimthip Kochaiyaphum - both of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.   

Paper Abstract:

In this paper, we present a statistical and machine learning approach to the acoustic discrimination of a cross-linguistically unusual phonological contrast, initial geminates vs. singletons in Pattani Malay.

We show that the only statistically significant difference between geminates and singletons is the duration of the consonant itself. No differences in F0 and intensity were observed on the following vowel, contra earlier reports. We further investigated the robustness of this contrast using linear discriminant analysis.

Results show that discrimination is above chance, but poor (~62%). The large overlap between the two categories may be partly due to the naturalistic nature of our speech samples. However, we also found that the contrast is neutralized in some minimal pairs. This merger is surprising since initial geminates are often the sole realization of lexical and morphosyntactic contrasts. We suggest that the singleton/initial geminate contrast is now best characterized as a marginal contrast.

We hypothesize that this marginally contrastive status may be the result of an on-going sound change, perhaps connected with the more modest role that initial geminates play in Pattani Malay morphophonological alternations.

Rachel Vogel presented a paper titled "The phonology of multiple types of vowel devoicing in Cheyenne"  at the 52nd Algonquian Conference, held Oct 23-25, 2020 in Madison, Wisconsin.

Paper Abstract:

This paper provides a new phonological analysis of three vowel devoicing (VD) patterns in Cheyenne (Algonquian, spoken in Montana and Oklahoma[1]). I propose that they reflect two fundamentally different types phenomena based on their segmental and prosodic conditioning environments: one domain span process involving [spread glottis] (SG), and two domain limit processes involving [-voice]. I demonstrate that VD is not one unitary phenomenon and moreover, multiple types of VD can exist within one language.

My analysis also provides evidence that both [-voice] and [SG] are active in Cheyenne. Prepenultimate devoicing (PPD) affects vowels before voiceless fricatives in any syllable preceding the penult[2] (kȧhamaxe ‘stick’[3], devoiced vowels bolded in all examples). Phonological analyses of VD often involve the spreading of a laryngeal feature ([-voice] or [SG]) from the voiceless consonant to the vowel[4,5,6].

Because PPD occurs before fricatives but not other voiceless consonants, I propose that the crucial feature is [SG], following cross-linguistic arguments for default specification of [SG] for voiceless fricatives[7]. Penultimate devoicing (PD) affects underlying word-final syllables before any voiceless consonant, but surfaces in penultimate syllables due to <e> epenthesis after word-final obstruents[2] (matsénėsts<e> ‘kingfisher’[3]). While feature spreading could account for PD like PPD, since PD occurs before more consonant types, the same laryngeal feature cannot predict the application of both processes.

This suggests that PD involves [-voice] (specified for all voiceless consonants), rather than [SG]. PD and PPD also differ in their prosodic environments. PPD is a domain span process, applying freely throughout most of the word; PD is a domain limit process, targeting only one (word-final) syllable. Phrase-final devoicing (PFD) is also a domain limit process, affecting phrase-final vowels[2] (návóómo ‘I see him’[2]). Since it occurs even without adjacent voiceless consonants, PFD cannot result from feature spreading. Instead, I propose the insertion of [-voice] at phrase boundaries.

References

[1] Leman, W. 2001. A Reference Grammar of the Cheyenne Language. Lulu Press.

[2] Leman, W. and R. Rhodes. 1978. Cheyenne Vowel Devoicing. In Papers of the Ninth Algonquian Conference. ed. by W. Cowan. Ottawa: Carleton University, pp. 3–24.

[3] Fisher, L., W. Leman, L. Pine Sr. and M. Sanchez. 2017. Cheyenne Dictionary. Chief Dull Knife College. http://www.cheyennelanguage.org/dictionary/ lexicon/index.htm.

[4] McCawley, J. D. 1968. The Phonological Component of a Grammar of Japanese. The Hague: Mouton.

[5] Cho, Y.-M. Y. 1993. The Phonology and Phonetics of ‘Voiceless’ Vowels. In Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS) 19, pp. 64–75.

[6] Tsuchida, A. 2001. Japanese Vowel Devoicing: Cases of Consecutive Devoicing Environments. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 10.3, pp. 225–245.

[7] Vaux, B. and B. Miller. 2011. The Representation of Fricatives. In The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, pp. 1–25.

The Linguistics Department welcomes Dr. Helena Aparicio to Cornell!

Dr. Aparicio uses a combination of experimental and computational methods to study how humans process and interpret language.

Her current research seeks to tease apart what aspects of linguistic meaning are grammatically encoded vs. pragmatically derived during linguistic interactions.

In preparation for Dr. Aparicio's January 2021 move to Ithaca, the Department is renovating a Morrill Hall space for her office and her new eye-tracking laboratory.  Her new facility will be next to the Computational Linguistics Lab, and just down the hall from the Phonetics Laboratory. 

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