Friday February 23rd 15:30 Greenberg Room
University of Paris III
Voiceless, vowel-less syllables in Tashlhiyt Berber: phonetic and phonological evidence
Different approaches of assigning syllable structure have in common the fact that the distribution between nuclear and non-nuclear syllable constituents is highly correlated with the difference between vowels and consonants (Kenstowicz 1994). This correlation is not absolute; witness the numerous cases, in different languages, where consonants can occupy syllable nucleus positions (e.g. the /l/ in English [bɑ.tl] "bottle", the /r/ in Czech in [br.no] "Brno", or the /n/ in German [ha.bn] "to have"). Notice, however, that all these nulcear consonants are sonorants. Because of their inherent properties, these segments behave like vowels (they are produced with spontaneous vocal-fold vibration and display a vowel-like acoustic structure). The case of languages where any segment, including voiceless obstruents, can form the syllable nuclei is far more surprising. At least two such languages have been reported in literature, the Salish language Nuxalk (Bella Coola) (Bagemihl 1991) and a Tashlhiyt Berber language (Dell & Elmedlaoui 2002). In this talk, I will deal with Tashlhiyt Berber and tackle the issue of the uniqueness of the syllable structure of this language.
The syllable structure of Tashlhiyt Berber was initially described by Dell and Elmedlaoui in two widely read studies (1985, 1988). This syllable structure, usually cited as a typologically unique phenomenon (e.g. Zec 1995), became a famous example in phonology, especially since its use by Prince & Smolensky (1993) as a prime illustration of Optimality Theory. The most striking and controversial examples, taken as arguments in favor of this analysis, involve consonant-only words (e.g. [tssrglttnt] "you closed them"). This claim is challenged by different authors who argue that the alleged consonant-only sequences are actually pronounced with epenthetic schwa vowels in the context of the syllabic consonants (Coleman 1996, 1999, 2001, Louali & Puech 1996, 1999, 2000, Angoujard 1997). In this talk, I will try to determine, based on phonetic and phonological data, whether, in addition to /a/, /i/, and /u/, there is a fourth vocalic segment at the level of phonetic and phonological representations that can act as a syllable peak.
One particular aspect of this question concerns the laryngeal quality (voiced or voiceless) of epenthetic vowels. In Tashlhiyt Berber, roots and affixes may consist at the underlying level of consonants only; when combined they can give rise to long sequences consisting of only voiceless obstruents (e.g. /tkkst/ "you took off", /tftktstt/ "you sprained it (fem)", /tsskʃftstttfktstt/ "you dried it and you gave it"). Acoustic, fiberscopic, and photoelectroglottographic data will be presented showing that such words are genuinely voiceless and deprived of schwa vowels which can act as syllable nuclei. In addition to these phonetic data, two additional types of evidence will be presented for the position that there are truly vowel-less syllables in this language, metrics and an assibilation process. The argument, based on versification, shows that voiceless obstruent-only syllables of the type [tk] are treated in Tashlhiyt poetry as light syllables in which the second consonant is a nucleus and not a coda. The second type of evidence, based on the behaviour of dental stops vis-à-vis the process of assibilation, shows that two consonants not separated at the underlying level by one of the full vowels /a, i, u/ are adjacent at the surface. To conclude, I will present results of a preliminary study, based on electropalatographic data, in which I handle the issue of the phonetic manifestations of consonant-only syllables in Tashlhiyt Berber.