Central Arrernte

Abstract

Central Arrernte is the language of an area centred on the present-day town of Alice Springs, in Central Australia. It is one of a group of dialects or closely-related languages spoken or formerly spoken over most of the southeast quarter of the Northern Territory and extending on the east side into the far-western part of Queensland; a slightly less closely-related language extends south into the north-central part of South Australia. They include varieties using the names Anmatyerr, Alyawarr and Antekerrepenh as well as several varieties using the name Arrernte with (nowadays) English geographical qualifiers. The major surviving varieties, Eastern, Central and Western Arrernte, Eastern and Western Anmatyerr, Southern and Northern Alyawarr each have several hundred to a thousand speakers, and are still being learned by many of the children, who grow up bilingual (in English) or multilingual. Breen (2001) is a brief introduction to the phonology of these languages.

The evolution of auditory dispersion in bidirectional constraint grammars

“…1c). For instance, languages with only one category on the continuum of voice onset time (VOT) for plosives, such as Central Arrernte (Breen & Dobson 2005), typically have only the zero VOT value, as in the plain voiceless plosive [p], 1 while languages with three categories, such as Thai (Tingsabadh & Abramson 1999), typically have a 'prevoiced ' [b] (negative VOT), [p] (zero VOT) and an aspirated [pH] (positive VOT). Likewise, languages with only one high vowel, such as Margi (Maddieson 1987) or Kabardian (Choi 1991), tend to have a vowel with a mid second formant (F2) value, such as [], while languages with three high vowels, such as Polish (Jassem 2003), most often have a rounded back vowel [u] (low F2), a central vowel [] (mid F2) and a spread front vowel [i] (high F2).…”

Melodic heads, saliency, and strength in voicing and nasality

“…heterorganic plosive-plosive or liquid-stop clusters. Nevins & Topintzi (2014; in press) also provide several counterarguments to Breen & Pensalfini's (1999) "strict VC" analysis, and they provide evidence which lends further support to the analysis of prenasalised stops as single constituents in Arrernte (evidence actually already discussed by Breen & Dobson 2005), namely that they cannot be split up in the language game Rabbit Talk, which moves word final material (the last VC(C)) to the front of the word-evidence that the targeted material forms a constituent. This "resilience" of the prenasalised stops against being broken up is straight-forward under the assumptions made by Maddieson & Ladefoged (1993) and Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996), which I have adopted above, and an analysis of these segments as branching constituents of the type (9c) as I have consequentially proposed here.…”

“…Of course it must be noted that some sources, e.g. Breen & Pensalfini (1999) and Breen & Dobson (2005), do not analyse the prenasalised series of stops as single constituents at all, but rather propose that they are among the highly restricted set of heterorganic clusters permitted in the language. They can do this only because they analyse Arrernte as a language that does not allow any word-initial onset consonants whatsoever.…”

Stress Effects on Stop Bursts in Five Languages

“…Arrernte (Breen & Dobson, 2005;Breen & Pensalfini, 1999;Henderson, 2013;Henderson & Dobson, 1994;Wilkins, 1989), Pitjantjatjara (Douglas, 1957(Douglas, , 1964Goddard, 1986Goddard, , 1993Goddard, , 1996, and Warlpiri (Hale, 1995;Hoogenraad & Laughren, 2012;Nash, 1986) are all languages of Central Australia. Each language has about 2,000 speakers, and all are still being learned by infants.…”

“…For further details on possible word structures in the languages studied here, including some of the words used in the present study, the reader is referred to the Illustrations of the IPA published for Arrernte (Breen & Dobson, 2005), Australian English (Cox & Palethorpe, 2007), Makasar , and Pitjantjatjara . Indeed, the Makasar and Pitjantjatjara Illustrations form part of the data presented here.…”