Rachel Vogel presented a paper titled "The phonology of multiple types of vowel devoicing in Cheyenne"  at the 52nd Algonquian Conference, held Oct 23-25, 2020 in Madison, Wisconsin.

Paper Abstract:

This paper provides a new phonological analysis of three vowel devoicing (VD) patterns in Cheyenne (Algonquian, spoken in Montana and Oklahoma[1]). I propose that they reflect two fundamentally different types phenomena based on their segmental and prosodic conditioning environments: one domain span process involving [spread glottis] (SG), and two domain limit processes involving [-voice]. I demonstrate that VD is not one unitary phenomenon and moreover, multiple types of VD can exist within one language.

My analysis also provides evidence that both [-voice] and [SG] are active in Cheyenne. Prepenultimate devoicing (PPD) affects vowels before voiceless fricatives in any syllable preceding the penult[2] (kȧhamaxe ‘stick’[3], devoiced vowels bolded in all examples). Phonological analyses of VD often involve the spreading of a laryngeal feature ([-voice] or [SG]) from the voiceless consonant to the vowel[4,5,6].

Because PPD occurs before fricatives but not other voiceless consonants, I propose that the crucial feature is [SG], following cross-linguistic arguments for default specification of [SG] for voiceless fricatives[7]. Penultimate devoicing (PD) affects underlying word-final syllables before any voiceless consonant, but surfaces in penultimate syllables due to <e> epenthesis after word-final obstruents[2] (matsénėsts<e> ‘kingfisher’[3]). While feature spreading could account for PD like PPD, since PD occurs before more consonant types, the same laryngeal feature cannot predict the application of both processes.

This suggests that PD involves [-voice] (specified for all voiceless consonants), rather than [SG]. PD and PPD also differ in their prosodic environments. PPD is a domain span process, applying freely throughout most of the word; PD is a domain limit process, targeting only one (word-final) syllable. Phrase-final devoicing (PFD) is also a domain limit process, affecting phrase-final vowels[2] (návóómo ‘I see him’[2]). Since it occurs even without adjacent voiceless consonants, PFD cannot result from feature spreading. Instead, I propose the insertion of [-voice] at phrase boundaries.

References

[1] Leman, W. 2001. A Reference Grammar of the Cheyenne Language. Lulu Press.

[2] Leman, W. and R. Rhodes. 1978. Cheyenne Vowel Devoicing. In Papers of the Ninth Algonquian Conference. ed. by W. Cowan. Ottawa: Carleton University, pp. 3–24.

[3] Fisher, L., W. Leman, L. Pine Sr. and M. Sanchez. 2017. Cheyenne Dictionary. Chief Dull Knife College. http://www.cheyennelanguage.org/dictionary/ lexicon/index.htm.

[4] McCawley, J. D. 1968. The Phonological Component of a Grammar of Japanese. The Hague: Mouton.

[5] Cho, Y.-M. Y. 1993. The Phonology and Phonetics of ‘Voiceless’ Vowels. In Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS) 19, pp. 64–75.

[6] Tsuchida, A. 2001. Japanese Vowel Devoicing: Cases of Consecutive Devoicing Environments. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 10.3, pp. 225–245.

[7] Vaux, B. and B. Miller. 2011. The Representation of Fricatives. In The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, pp. 1–25.

The Linguistics Department welcomes Dr. Helena Aparicio to Cornell!

Dr. Aparicio uses a combination of experimental and computational methods to study how humans process and interpret language.

Her current research seeks to tease apart what aspects of linguistic meaning are grammatically encoded vs. pragmatically derived during linguistic interactions.

In preparation for Dr. Aparicio's January 2021 move to Ithaca, the Department is renovating a Morrill Hall space for her office and her new eye-tracking laboratory.  Her new facility will be next to the Computational Linguistics Lab, and just down the hall from the Phonetics Laboratory. 

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Katherine Blake presented a paper titled "Shareable TTS Components" at the American Association for Machine Translation (AMTA) MT Summit XVIII, held virtually October 6-9, 2020.  

Katherine co-authored the paper with Al Sagheer, Z.,  Iglehart, V., LaRocca, S., Morgan, J., Murray, J.