In syllable reduction, the vowel of a nonfinal syllable deletes (. . . CV.CV . . .), resulting in the creation of a consonant cluster (. . . C.CV . . .) where the first consonant of such a cluster can be said to be phonetically simplified with respect to the original consonant. Ye'kwana presents some unique features of syllable reduction: (i) attested thus far only at morpheme boundaries, alternation of reducing syllables occurs here within a single morpheme; (ii) reduction is conditioned by what could be analyzed as vowel initial suffixes. This latter phenomenon deviates from the patterns found in other Cariban languages and appears to violate explanations given in terms of syllable structure constraints. I discuss the problems in generating a synchronic phonological analysis to model the resultant apparent counterexamples, and then I demonstrate that this apparent violation is historically consistent with the overall pattern, but that a late sound change has eliminated the onset consonant from the suffix.
No abstract
Ye’kwana is an Amazonian language of the Cariban family spoken by a group of about 8,700 people in Venezuela and Brazil. This paper explores the expression of Path in spontaneous motion events based on spoken data collected for the documentation and description of the language including data collected with the Trajectoire elicitation material (Ishibashi et al. 2006). In Ye’kwana, Path is mainly expressed by postpositional and adverbial stems: there is a rich inventory of 80 postpositions all compatible with locative and either allative or perlative uses and 29 spatial adverbs, most of deictic nature. Source is expressed with a dedicated suffix (-nno) which combines with almost all the spatial postpositions and adverbs. The data show that the asymmetries in the expression of Path are not only found between Source and Goal but also need to include the expression of Medium for which the language has dedicated forms.
Yawarana (Cariban) is a critically endangered language of Venezuela, with 20–30 speakers and little published research beyond wordlists. In these wordlists, orthographic indications of stress and/or vowel length are inconsistent. As part of our language documentation project, we examine acoustic correlates of prominence in Yawarana. Many other languages in the Cariban family have a clear rhythmic stress system, with vowel lengthening and pitch excursion marking prominence; Yawarana does not mark prominence in the same way. Even so, in some situations, native speakers do appear to attend to stress (i.e., when correcting the pronunciation of language learners). Here, we ask what the acoustic correlates of prominence are, paying particular attention to intensity, pitch, and duration information. We are examining over 200 lexical items produced by four native speakers. These items are repeated in isolation, produced in carrier phrases, and produced in narratives and conversations. We compare measures of prominence in each of these situations. This investigation will pave the way for a more in-depth study of acoustic features of Yawarana and will inform future studies of prominence in other Cariban languages.
Ye'kwana (mch, Cariban) is a language of Venezuela and Brazil spoken by about 9,000 people. An imperfective construction, cognate to a nominal construction, has introduced an ergative alignment in main clauses where all the other inflections, including past-perfectives, are non-ergative. This construction presents the same argument structure as the action nominalization: the absolutive (S/O) is prefixed as a verbal index and unmarked for case when overtly expressed; reference to the ergative (A) is not obligatory, but if an A (pro)noun occurs, it must be case marked. Typologically, it is unexpected that the sole innovative ergative main clause type identified to date in Ye'kwana codes the Imperfective aspect. This example can now be added to multiple counterexamples from the Cariban family, each independently innovated, demonstrating that claims of a universal correlation between ergativity per se with either past tense or perfective aspect can no longer be sustained. This paper analyzes the discourse distribution of the innovative construction based on a corpusstudy.
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