Natalia Eraso, L’épenthèse syllabique sur les racines verbales en tanimuka
L’objectif de cette communication est de présenter un phénomène non répertorié dans les langues tucano de l’Amazonie colombienne, à savoir, l’apparition d’une syllabe épenthétique qui permet de supporter le deuxième ton (ton flottant) d’une mélodie tonale. Cette syllabe est rattachée aux racines verbales monosyllabiques et à certains morphèmes monosyllabiques. Dans cette présentation, on examinera de l’épenthèse syllabique sur les racines verbales.
La langue en question est le tanimuka, de la famille tucano oriental, parlée par les groupes tanimuka et letuama, dans les départements de Amazonas y Vaupés, en Colombie.
Deux tons ponctuels, Haut (H) et Bas (L) forment trois mélodies tonales qui se superposent sur les racines verbales. Trois éléments permettent de reconnaitre si une racine verbale est monosyllabique : l’apparition de la syllabe épenthétique, une manifestation différente de la nasalité et une différente réalisation de l’impératif. Ces manifestations regroupent la conjugaison verbale de la langue en deux classes différentes.
Magdalena Lemus, Verbal prosody in Yukuna
The goal of this paper is to offer a detailed account of verbal prosody in Yukuna (North-Amazonian Arawak). Arawak languages show a great diversity with regards to their prosodic systems (Wetzels and Meira 2010). Languages from the North-Amazonian branch are often described as having a “pitch-accent” system (Aikhenvald 2003), namely, a system in which “…pitch is the primary correlate of prominence and there are significant constraints on the pitch patterns for words...” (Bybee, Chakraborti, and Scheibman 1998, 277). This description also applies to Yukuna. However, previous studies (Schauer and Schauer 1972; Lemus Serrano 2016) had failed to grasp the role of pitch in the prosody of the language, and proposed an analysis in terms of a stress system. Robayo (2016) was the first to point out the tonal aspects of the language, but his study was based on a small fraction of the paradigm of verbal roots.
This paper aims at providing an in-depth description of the word-level prosody of the language, on the basis of a first-hand corpus of approximately 60 paradigms of verbal roots, each including about 30 different forms. Each target word was recorded three times, in non-final position within a frame sentence. The recordings were made with one female speaker, using a Zoom H4N and a Shure Beta 53 Omnidirectional Condenser Headworn Microphone.
The major findings revealed by this data are that: a. Surface tonal patterns are made up of four different tones: L, M, H, HL (falling); b. There is at least one H peak within the word (*#LL#), each peak possibly containing several adjacent H moras; c. L tone is not obligatory, as there can be words with only H (#HH#); d. Once the pitch drops, it can rise again, but always below the height of the preceding H peak; e. The position of H peaks is largely unpredictable and variable, as a single verbal root can display several surface tonal patterns throughout its paradigm; f. According to the tonal variations they display, roots can be grouped together in five distinct lexical classes; and lastly, g. The surface realization of most affixes depends on the lexical class of the root they attach to. Each claim will be illustrated with support from both sound files and spectrograms.
After describing the detail of the surface tonal patterns attested, we will conclude by discussing the possible analyses of Yukuna’s underlying prosodic system, and by comparing the features of this system to the tonal and the stress prototypes, following Hyman (2009). In doing so, this paper will contribute to the general knowledge on the typology of word-prosodic systems in the Arawak family, and more generally, in Amazonian languages.
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