Pre-stopping in Arabana

Abstract

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.

An investigation of the dynamics of vowel nasalization in Arabana using machine learning of acoustic features

“…Arabana is of particular interest for research on pre-stopping, because it is one of the few Australian languages in which pre-stopping is phonologically contrastive (Harvey et al, 2019); examples illustrating the contrast between pre-stopped and plain nasals in Arabana are provided in Table 1. The change from phonetically conditioned pre-stopping to phonologically contrastive pre-stopped forms is an exhausted sound change in Arabana and is no longer synchronically active in the language; the complex and unpredictable distribution of pre-stopped forms suggests that the change has indeed been inactive for some time.…”