AN ABSTRACT ON THE THESIS OFJose Benavides Pantoja, for the Master of Arts degree in Linguistics presented on April 30, 2020, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: PHONETIC VARIATION IN KAMËNTS̈Á: AN ANALYSIS OF STOPS AND AFFRICATESMAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Karen Baertsch This study contributes to the limited body of research concerned with documenting and studying the minority and indigenous languages of the world. More specifically, it focuses on Kamënts̈á, a language isolate spoken by less than 500 people in southern Colombia. According to UNESCO (2003), this language has been categorized as “definitely endangered” which makes its documentation even more critical. Although there have been initial investigations undertaken by Juajibioy, Howard, and McDowell, the scarce accessible research has relied on purely impressionistic reviews of the language, leading to unreliable conclusions and descriptions of the language. This thesis constitutes the first phonetic acoustic analysis of Kamënts̈á language in order to substantiate what has been described in the current literature. Additionally, the geographic location where Kamënts̈á emerged, together with Spanish, and Inga Kichwa has proven to be an intriguing sociohistorical and linguistic landscape for the study of these languages being an area worth of investigating. Given that there is no existing documentation of language variation in the language, the primary goal of this thesis is to analyze the production of plosive and affricate segments at a word-level to examine language variation at a phonetic level. Considering that Kamënts̈á has been poorly documented, it was not surprising for differences in the production to be found. One difference fell in the phonemic status of the segment between younger and older speakers of the language. The production of the segments in three linguistic environments at word-level attested for variation of some phonemes. For this study, data were collected from two experimental tasks. For the first task, eight Kamënts̈á-Spanish bilinguals (N=8) were recorded producing words in isolation in a word-elicitation exercise. The purpose of this task was to gather raw data on the production of the segments at word level. For the second task, the consultants were asked to take a sociolinguistic questionnaire. This instrument was designed to account for the linguistic ethnography and language ecology of the Kamënts̈á. The purpose of this task was also to tie sociolinguistic data from the speakers with any phonemic differences in the realization of the segments. Results supported the VOT framework proposed by Lisker and Abramson (1964) as an effective metric to measure the voicing status of plosives. For the analysis of affricates, the center of gravity and spectral peak location demonstrated accurate acoustic correlates to capture frication in the phonemes. Equally, amplitude provided valuable information for the analysis of prenasalization. What is more, consistent resemblances were found comparing Kamënts̈á with other studies regarding the acoustic cues, place and manner of articulation, and voicing status of the phonemes.

abstract: Languages have long been studied through the rhythm class framework, which discriminates them into separate classes on the basis of shared rhythmic properties. Originally these differences were attributed to the isochronous timing of different prosodic units, such as stress intervals in “stress-timed” languages and syllables in “syllable-timed” languages. More recent work has turned to durational metrics as a means of evaluating rhythm class, by measuring the variability and proportion of segmental intervals in the speech stream. Both isochrony and durational metrics are no longer viewed as correlative with natural language rhythm, but durational metrics in particular have remained prevalent in the literature. So long as the conclusions of durational metrics are not overextended, their analysis can provide a useful mechanism for assessing the compatibility of a language with a given rhythm class by way of comparative analysis. This study therefore presents a durational-metric comparison of Scottish Gaelic, a language which has frequently been described as stress-timed but has never been empirically tested for rhythm class, with English, a prototypical and well-studied example of a stress-timed language. The Gaelic metric scores for %V (percentage of vocalic content), ΔV (standard deviation in vocalic interval length), and ΔC (standard deviation in consonantal interval length) (Ramus et al. 1999) are shown to be very similar to those measured for English, indicating that the language displays similar patterns of durational variability and segmental proportion typically ascribed to a rhythmically stress-timed language. This provides clear support for the classification of Scottish Gaelic as stress-timed. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Linguistics and Applied Linguistics 2020

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the department of AFRICAN LANGUAGES at the UNIVERSITY OF ZULULAND, 2001. / This document consists of five chapters which are as follows: Chapter 1 is an introductory part where the primary concept "pidgin" will be defined. Other basic terms namely survey, target language, lingua franca, mother tongue and others are also defined. It will deal with a survey of pidgins of the world where trends of Fanakalo as a pidgin begin to appear. Chapter 2 will deal with comparison of Fanakalo varieties to the standard form of isiZulu where linguistic aspects such as phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics will be highlighted. Chapter 3 will focus on the extent to which Fanakalo lexicon can be compared with that of isiZulu. This will necessitate the inclusion of sociolinguistic aspects such as borrowing, adaptation, coinage and interlarding. Chapter 4 is concerned with the perceptions of Fanakalo by members of the community where the results of the interviews conducted will be given and analyzed accordingly. Chapter 5 which is the final chapter will be the conclusion where the viability of Fanakalo in the "New" South Africa as well as general statements about Fanakalo will be given.

The questions this study sought to answer were: Do normally developing children exhibit phonological process deviations; what is the frequency of occurrence of each phonological process deviation by age group; and does the number of phonological process deviations and the average total frequency of occurrence of phonological process deviations decrease as age increases?

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This dissertation is an empirical and theoretical study of sentence-level prosody in Conamara (Connemara) Irish. It addresses the architecture of the syntax-phonology interface and the relation between syntactic constituent structure and prosodic structure formation. It argues for a fully interactional view of the interface, in which the phonological form may be influenced by a number of competing factors, including constraints governing syntax-prosody correspondence, linearization, and prosodic well-formedness. The specific proposal is set within the framework of Match Theory (Selkirk 2009, 2011), an indirect-reference theory of the syntax-prosody interface in which correspondence between syntactic and prosodic constituents is governed by a family of violable Match constraints. These constraints call for a one-to-one correspondence between syntactic and prosodic structure, to the extent that prosodic structure may be recursive under pressure from the recursive nature of syntactic phrases. However, this direct correspondence can be overruled by other interacting constraints, including prosodic markedness constraints and, as proposed here, other correspondence relations, as on the linearization of hierarchical syntactic structures. This dissertation argues that the distribution of pitch accents in Conamara Irish provides direct evidence for Match Theory. It is proposed that two phrasal pitch accents, L-H and H-L, demarcate the edges of phonological phrases, where L-H accents specifically target only those phrases which are recursive. Using the distribution of these pitch accents as indicators for the presence of prosodic boundaries, the dissertation investigates a variety of syntactic structures in both the clausal and nominal domain. It is argued that there is a close correspondence between syntactic and prosodic structure in default cases, but that this direct correspondence may be subverted in favour of a structure which better satisfies higher-ranked prosodic markedness constraints. Finally, this dissertation addresses pronoun postposing, a process pervasive in Irish dialects in word order appears to be sensitive to prosodic structure. This dissertation proposes to account for this phenomenon using the theoretical framework developed in the dissertation, in which the main patterns are accounted for through the interaction of Match constraints, prosodic markedness constraints, and a proposed violable constraint on the linearization of syntactic structure.

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