Pre-stopping is a widespread and usually non-contrastive phenomenon in Australian languages. Contrastive pre-stopping is rare and materials on it are limited. Based partly on original phonetic data, this paper provides evidence that Arabana, a language of northern South Australia, has contrastive pre-stopping of both laterals and nasals. Current analyses of pre-stopping, both contrastive and non-contrastive, model pre-stopped sequences as complex segments, and relate their diachrony to perceptual motivations favouring the enhancement in the discrimination of place oppositions. We provide evidence that pre-stopped sequences in Arabana are best analyzed as heterosyllabic clusters, and that their diachrony centrally involves perceptual motivations favouring the augmentation of phonologically strong constituents, specifically stressed syllables.*The authors would like to thank a referee and the audience at the 17th Australian Languages Workshop at Marysville Victoria, 2-4 March 2018, for comments on previous versions of this paper. Special thanks go to Amber McKinney and Alessandra Hayward for the preparation of stimuli material, to Michael Carne, Chunyang Xiao, Juqiang Chen for all their hard work in preparing and coding the datasets, and to Siva Kalyan for data processing. Jane Simpson also thanks John McEntee for many years of fascinating discussion of pre-stopping in the neighbouring Thura-Yura languages.
Summary Ergative marking and function are generally adequately described in the grammars of the small minority of the Aboriginal Australian Pama-Nyungan languages made before 1930. Without the benefit of an inherited descriptive framework in which to place foreign ergative morphosyntax, missionary-grammarians engaged a variety of terminology and descriptive practices when explaining foreign ergative structures exhibited by this vast genetic subgroup of languages spoken in an area larger than Europe. Some of the terminology had been previously employed in descriptions of other ergative languages. Other terms were innovated in Australia. The great distances separating missionary-grammarians describing different Pama-Nyungan languages, and the absence of a coordinating body fostering Australian grammatical description, meant that grammars were produced in geographic and intellectual isolation from one another. Regional schools of descriptive influence are however apparent, the strongest of which originates in grammars written by Lutheran missionaries of the ‘Adelaide School’. The synchronic descriptions of Pama-Nyungan languages made by missionary-grammarians in Australia informed the development of linguistics in Europe. There is however, little evidence of the movement of linguistic ideas from Europe back into Australia. The term ‘ergative’ to designate the case marking the agent of a transitive verb and the concept of an absolutive case became established practice in the modern era of Australian grammatical description without recognizing that the same terminology and concept of syntactic case had previously been employed in descriptions of Pama-Nyungan languages written in German. The genesis of the term ‘ergative’ originates in the description of Australian Pama-Nyungan case systems.
This paper presents exploratory research on temporally dynamic patterns of vowel nasalization from two speakers of Arabana. To derive a dynamic measure of nasality, we use gradient tree boosting algorithms to statistically learn the mapping between acoustics and vowel nasality in a speaker-specific manner. Three primary findings emerge: (1) NVN contexts exhibit nasalization throughout the entirety of the vowel interval, and we propose that a similar co-articulatory realization previously acted to resist diachronic change in this environment; (2) anticipatory vowel nasalization is nearly as extensive as carryover vowel nasalization, which is contrary to previous claims; and (3) the degree of vowel nasalization in word-initial contexts is relatively high, even in the #_C environment, suggesting that the sound change *#Na > #a has involved the loss of the oral constriction associated with N but not the complete loss of the velum gesture.
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