phonetics and word definition in ahtna athabascan

Phonetics and word definitionin Ahtna Athabascan*

SIRI G. TUTTLE

Abstract

This article investigates the question of word definition in a polysyntheticlanguage, Ahtna Athabascan. Syntactic models of polysynthetic languagescannot explain why some syntactic strings constitute sentences and otherswords, since they represent both in the same component. In the most articu-lated of such theories, e.g., Rice (2000) and Hale (2001) for Athabascanlanguages, it is explicit that words are formed based on prosodic principles.It follows that there should be unambiguous cues to the left and right edgeof the word. Two possibilities for these cues are explored: acoustic evidencefor consonant fortition and phonological evidence from lexicon search. Con-sonant fortition does not mark edges of Ahtna words, but stem-initial con-sonants undergo fortition, and there may be fortition of the first conjunctprefix following the disjunct boundary. Other cues include stress, consonantcluster patterns in prefix strings, and stem-final laryngeal neutralizations.In addition, while stress and syllabification patterns can help a listenershape words in Ahtna, lexical knowledge is also required. Morphologicaldesignations such as prefix and su‰x are still essential. Given these require-ments, a substantial role for morphology is indicated in addition to syntaxand prosody.

1. Introduction

Athabascan languages are predominantly prefixing, often displaying manyprefixes together in a phonologically opaque complex preceding the stemof the verb. They also employ su‰xation to a much more limited extent,and often a single Athabascan ‘‘word’’ can represent everything necessaryto express what English speakers require a ‘‘sentence’’ to do. The com-plexity and typological exoticism of the verb word has led to a numberof disparate analyses, some including syntactic principles in addition to,

Linguistics 46–2 (2008), 439–471DOI 10.1515/LING.2008.015

0024–3949/08/0046–04396 Walter de Gruyter

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

(AutoPDF V7 16/1/08 17:39) WDG (148!225mm) TimesM J-1904 Linguistics, 46:2 PMU: D(A) 27/12/2007 pp. 439–470 1904_46-2_08 (p. 439)

or in replacement of, morphological principles in building Athabascanverbs. Because syntax exists outside the word as well, an analysis that re-lies entirely on syntactic principles to form a verb requires an additionalprosodic counterpart that can explain the relationship between the syntaxand the prosodic word.The insights that syntactic analyses contribute to the study of this lan-

guage family are challenged by the need to rebuild the big picture whenwe are done considering word-internal syntax. How, in the end, do weunderstand what a word is, and how it fits into the grammar, if only thoseprinciples are applied that operate word-externally in isolating languages?This question is bigger than the usual Athabascanist squabbles about theinternal structure of the verb complex. It goes to the heart of the organi-zation of grammar. If we can imagine a language in which only syntaxand phonology exist, is it not possible that all languages are similar, andthat morphology is expendable? With such consequences at stake, it is im-portant to clarify just how prosodic word definition could work.In this article I will explore some possibilities for prosodic word

definition in a Northern Athabascan language, Ahtna, which is well-documented and for which there is extensive documentation of verb struc-ture. I assume that if a verb becomes a word phonologically, there shouldbe overt prosodic marking of its edges, and an overall shaping of relativeprominences. The article will look at the prosody of Ahtna verbs fromseveral di¤erent angles: we will consider phonetic information relevantto prominence relations between stems and prefixes; facts about phonemedistribution within the verb word; and facts about syllable structure indi¤erent parts of the verb. The search for edges will turn out to be invain, at least for the materials considered here. However, prominentstems do shape verbs prosodically in this language.This article includes the results of three small phonetic studies of words

in Ahtna, an Athabascan language spoken in Alaska. Tuttle (2002) lookedat consonant fortition e¤ects in di¤erent positions in complex Ahtnaverbs; Tuttle (2003) is a study of the phonetics of stressed Ahtna vowels,based on a recorded text. Both studies found that the prefixal beginningsof Ahtna verbs are nonprominent. Final or near-final stems, which areprominent, cannot be depended on for word beginnings. A third phoneticstudy considers further textual material, returning to the measurementof consonants to look for word-initial or word-final e¤ects. The text isfrom the same speaker as that in the vowel study: Katie John’s narra-tion of ‘‘Lazeni ’Iinn Natae!de Ghadghaande,’’ When Russians wereKilled at ‘Roasted Salmon Place’ (Batzulnetas). The text was recordedand transcribed by James Kari, and appears in published form in Kari(1986).

440 S. Tuttle

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


2. Ahtna

Ahtna is a Central Alaskan Athabascan language, very closely related toTanacross, Tanana, Dena’ina and Koyukon, but probably most closelyrelated to its southern neighbor Dena’ina. It is spoken from Cantwell, onthe Denali highway, to Chickaloon, just north of Anchorage, and up thedrainage of the Copper River all the way to Mentasta. The northernbranch of Athabascan, to which the Central Alaskan languages belong,is related to geographically separate branches, Pacific Coast Athabascan(e.g., Hupa, Tolowa) and Apachean (e.g., Navajo, Apache). Ahtna is highlyendangered, spoken mostly by people over 50, and is not being passed on.The Ahtna language has been well documented, with a full stem dictio-

nary (Kari 1990) and texts (e.g., Kari 1986). While the language is nowseverely endangered, with few speakers under the age of 50, there are au-dio recordings going back to the 1960s that preserve Ahtna languagesamples created under spontaneous conditions. Despite endangered sta-tus, Ahtna also still has some very accomplished elders who can helpwork with recorded and transcribed texts. This situation allows a carefulexamination of the prosodic status of words, which I hope to begin withthis article.

2.1. Verb themes in Ahtna

Through the Ahtna data we approach some classic problems in the repre-sentation of the Athabascan verb. Athabascan verbs are predominantlyprefixing, often displaying six or more prefixes before the stem, and oneor more su‰xes. (1a) shows a surface form, spelled in the Ahtna spellingsystem, and (1b) the underlying verb theme, or lexical form, with threeprefixes that must be listed with the stem to make up that form. Elementsthat are adjacent in a verb theme may be separated by inflectional mor-phemes in the surface form.

(1) a. Tadeldlo’‘Water is gurgling.’ (Surface form)

b. taa d" l" dlok’into watera qualifier" classifier" ‘laugh’(Lexical listing: verb theme)

Verb theme entries are a formal device for showing what elements haveto be listed in a dictionary for a person who knows the language to beable to reconstitute the verb. In the verb theme formula, ‘‘a’’ indicatesan important word-internal boundary conventionally known as the dis-junct boundary; ‘‘"’’ is a morpheme boundary.

Phonetics and word definition 441

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


A verb theme entry makes a number of assumptions about the natureof Athabascan verbs. It says: In a verb there must be a stem, and thereare other elements which seem to attach to it, both before and after.These elements are often subsyllabic, like the ‘‘d’’ and ‘‘l’’ in the presentexample. Presumably, when we put a real word together, we end up withsomething that has syllables. Here, the finished form has a vowel in itwhich does not appear in the verb theme; it has been claimed to be anepenthetic vowel (e.g., Kari 1990), and to be part of the modal or aspec-tual inflection (e.g., Hargus and Tuttle 1997). Either way, that vowel isnot listed in the dictionary, but it has to be there for the finished form tomean what it does.The verb theme formalism, and the fact that we write such strings as this

without orthographic spaces between the parts, is something more than or-thographic convention. It predicts and claims that such objects as tadeldlo’are constituents in the Ahtna language. It says they are verbs, which areusually considered words, and it assumes that prefixes and su‰xes may beadded to stems in strict orderings that are governed by the morphology ofthe language. Generally, though not without exception, it also indicatesthat no word-sized items not listed in the theme can be inserted betweenits parts — the unit cannot be intruded upon by the syntax. It is partly theexceptions to this rule that create the temptation to treat the wholeNorthern Athabascan verb as a syntactic object. However, the way thatwords are listed lexically, and play out into sentences, is also conduciveto such analyses. This will be exemplified in the following section.

2.2. Words and verb themes in Ahtna

Verb themes state the lexical requirements and the argument structure ofAthabascan verbs. Verb theme notations in themselves do not make anyprediction about the lexical status of elements which are syntacticallyrequired by the verb — that is, about whether these elements must bepart of the verb word, or not. Example (2) shows a sentence from one ofKari’s (1986) Mentasta texts. The conventions of sorting out and writingthe Ahtna language result in one orthographic word in (2a), while in (2b)and (2c) they spell out as two and multiple words, respectively.

(2) Verb theme:Complement (ko") d" u "’aa#

COMP (Areal") qualifier"classifier"‘linear extends’‘State, situation exists in manner of complement’(Kari 1990, 76)

442 S. Tuttle

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


a. Expressed in one word (aspect, pronominal marking included)Yede’aaye" d" e" ’aa3sO"qualifier"aspect"‘linear extends’‘He betrayed him, is opposed to him’

In (2a), the third person ye-pronoun is the complement. Since it is ana‰x, the product is a word. This is a case where the areal prefix /ko-/ isnot required.

(2) b. Expressed in two wordsUts’e’ hwde’aau" ts’e’ ako" d" e" ’aa3s" ‘to’ aAR" qualifier" aspect" ‘linear extends’‘He is lucky’ (lit. ‘the situation extends to him.’)

In (2b), the first word, uts’e’, constitutes a postpositional phrase, with athird person pronoun prefix as object. The phoneme hw is the allomorphof the areal prefix that occurs before a consonant. The postpositionalphrase, uts’e’, ‘to him,’ is the complement.

(2) c. Expressed in several words’Ele’ c’a hnaa gha s’e! hwdi’ah.’ele’ c’a hnaa gha s’"e! ko" d" i"NEG and work for me"with AR" qualifier" NEG "’aa" h‘extends’" NEG‘I don’t feel like working.’

The complement is the sequence of phrases hnaa gha s’e , literally ‘workfor with me,’ but idiomatically perhaps ‘for me to work’. The areal prefixdoes occur, and negative is marked in three places.

(2) d. Expressed as one word, but including an incorporated nounBesiits’de’aab"e siits’ d" e" ’aa3s P ‘breath’ qualifier aspect extends‘He is breathing heavily.’

The string siits’ is found as a noun in obligatorily prefixed forms such asuyiits’, ‘his breath,’ with voiced y as an allophone of initial s. The formwith the initial s is only possible in an incorporated version, such as thisexample (Kari 1990: 77).The examples in (2) show that verb themes contain information about

syntactic requirements of verbs — their argument structure — as well as


1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


morphological requirements. However, the verb theme representationmakes no prediction, in itself, about how the words in full sentences willend up playing out the argument structure. If all elements in the comple-ment are expressible as either verbal prefixes or incorporated stems, thena single word can spell out a verb theme with a complement. If the com-plement consists of a full phrase or more than a full phrase, containingitems that are syntactically independent of verb structure, then the samelexical structure plays out in what we think of more easily as syntax.This is only a problem, I believe, if we insist that all syntactically requiredelements must have an expression in separate words. To do this would beto lose the distinctions between word and clitic, clitic and a‰x, that canexist in any language.

3. Listening with European ears and the assumptions of orthographicconvention

The construct missing from our discussion so far, but essential to the mix,is the judgment of speakers on what constitutes a word. This article isbased on the claim that a string that is written without orthographicspaces, in Kari’s 1990 dictionary of Ahtna, represents some form of thisjudgment. An assumption along these lines underlies all the morphologi-cal and syntactic analyses of Athabascan verbs created to date, althoughdetails may di¤er depending on the language of focus.Rice (p.c.) suggests that Athabascan orthography has become consis-

tent due to acceptance of previous researchers’ assumptions, or maybethe same English base of most researchers. I believe that acceptance ofprevious assumptions is a more likely explanation for orthographic con-sistency than influence of non-Athabascan languages. Nevertheless, thequestion arises: could we have written the words di¤erently? Is the wholeorthographic tradition just wrong? Is there a consistent stopping placewithin what we have been calling a verb, where we really should be plac-ing an orthographic space?It is interesting to look at early naive writing of Ahtna in this context,

because it provides some idea of how the European ear does hear the lan-guage. An example of naıve transcription of Ahtna by a speaker of Euro-pean languages can be found in the Ahtna words collected by Peter Dor-oschin (a Russian engineer) between 1848 and 1852, and published byRadlo¤ in 1874. Examples from this list (which also contains words inseveral other languages, collected by others) are given in Table 1. SinceDoroschin’s list is only found in Radlo¤, we do not really know who pro-vided the word breaks, but it seems fair to ascribe them to the original

444 S. Tuttle

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


Table 1. Doroschin’s Ahtna as published in Radlo¤ (1874)

As publishedin Radlo¤

Annotation by Kari ofAhtna (orthography); mygloss

Relation between German andAhtna

a) ssa unisbringenEng. ‘to bring’Two words

sa’uniis‘Get, take it for me’One word

D.’s word break occurs atAhtna glottal stop

b) tiscinIch will essenEng. ‘I want to eat’One word

destsiin‘I am hungry’One word

Ahtna and German syllablestructure is congruent, andconsonant sounds are familiar.

c) s saatGattinEng. ‘wife’Two words

s’aat‘my wife’One word

The unfamiliar phoneme,glottal stop, again interruptsthe word string for Doroschin.

d) l’x coxogrunEng. ‘green’Two words

ltsoghOne word

Here the string is interruptedby an unexpected cluster ofvoiced l and strongly aspiratedts, which ranges from alveolarto palatal. I do not understandthe accent following the l.

e) ne cegaHaarEng. ‘hair’Two words

netsigha’‘our hair’One word

The stem boundary, followingthe possessive prefix, seems tosuggest a new word (this is alsoan alternative analysis of s’aat,above).

f ) txlik jaHundEng. ‘dog’Two words

!ic’ae‘dog’One word

The stress on this word is onthe second syllable, so c’ae istreated prosodically as a stemby modern Ahtnas. It looks asif Doroschin heard it more likea compound, and wanted toseparate two prominent vowelsinto two words.

g) tainec eta zaanneInselEng. ‘island’Three words

taniidze taz’aani‘that which is in themiddle of the water,’ i.e.,‘island’Two words

Doroschin gets three words outof Kari’s two. I’m not sure Iunderstand the breaking oftaniidze, but the break beforethe z probably has to do withthat interrupting glottal stopagain (this one is also stem-initial).

h) naaicaaneMessingEng. ‘brass’

One word

na’aay tsaane’‘brass’lit. ‘sun’s excrement,’ listedas ‘rust’ in Kari 1990.

Two words

This rendition of thecompound shows an oppositesolution to that of !ic’ae; acompound is written as onestring rather than being brokenup. Even the glottal stop in


1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


Table 1 (Continued )

na’aay doesn’t rate a break. Iinclude this example to showthat inconsistency is as muchpart of the pattern of earlynaıve transcription as native-language interference is; thewriter is trying hard to hearnew sounds and organize them,and he is experimenting.

i) sla-kanniNagelEng. FingernailOne word withhyphen

slaggane’‘my fingernail’One word

The employment of hyphensallows naıve writers to half-separate prosodic units they areidentifying, or to indicate clearsyllable breaks. In this case, thebreak comes between the twostems of the compound. Sincethe second stem in a compoundis more prominent, thisconsonant would haveundergone fortition, giving it avery long closure.

j) jajak xasiNordlichtEng. NorthernLightsTwo words

yayekaasi‘Aurora’One word

Another compound separatedinto two words. Here,components of a highlyaspirated consonant (the k ofthe orthography is IPA [qh])are separated, along with thetwo prominent vowels in thefirst and third syllables.

k) nat exe‘Schnee’ (n)Eng. ‘snow’

nadaexi‘snow’ lit. ‘that which fallsdown.’

In this deverbal noun, thesingle stem daex isforegrounded by the wordbreak in Doroschin’s rendition.

l) khe ol cesTanzenEng. ‘to dance,’ or‘Dance!’Three words

c’uldzes‘He/she should dance,’ or‘you (sg.) should dance’One word

The ejective is heard toseparate itself as a syllable, andbreak from the prefix syllablethat Doroschin writes ol. Theisolation of the stem is natural,as discussed above.

m) ssi sca ziil xhenIch habe einenBieber getodtet.Eng. ‘I killed abeaver’Four words

Si tsa’ ze!ghaen.‘I killed a beaver.’Three words

The pronoun and noun areseparate in this sentence just asin Kari’s version. Only the verbgets subdivided, and thesubdivision is at a stemboundary.

446 S. Tuttle

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


source as a hypothesis. James Kari has annotated the copy of Radlo¤ inthe ANLC archive, so his annotations are added to this table. The right-hand column contains my observations.What shows up most consistently in this list is that the hearer breaks

words when he hears a glottal stop; glottal stop is not a phoneme in Rus-sian or German, so this is no surprise (a, c). In (b) the expression is heardas one word by the naive writer and is so written by Kari. In (e, i) thebreak is heard at a stem boundary, which will seem reasonable once wehave looked at the phonetic studies of texts that follow in the present ar-ticle. Other unfamiliar phonemes also suggest word breaks: ejectives in (fand -l), and an aspirated uvular in ( j). In other cases, where there are noreally di‰cult consonants, the hearer has at times connected letters whenthe (German) prompt contains one word, and separated them when theprompt contains several (m). However, this is not always the case. Whatwe clearly see is that expressions that Kari, in the general tradition ofAthabascan writing systems, sets down as one word, do not sound likeone-word expressions to someone who doesn’t know Ahtna and speaks aEuropean language. This is because fortition cues that Europeans recog-nize as left edges of words do not occur at all left edges in Ahtna; theyonly occur at stem boundaries, and in limited context, following certainstructures within prefix sequences.The phonological facts that do help to define Athabascan verbs are

morphological and syntactic. A very early example of the application ofsuch facts to transcription/spelling is found in Sapir (1914). Sapir wasnew to Athabascan when he wrote this piece, and followed a transcriptionpractice similar to that of Goddard (1905) in his The Morphology of theHupa Language; that is, expressions listed in the article are separated bysyllable with a right-hand slash, and words are separated by spaces.Sapir writes the Chasta Costa phrases do / y!"c / t!! (IPA [to!.j"#§.t’"] ‘I

won’t fly’ and d!" / #A# /d!$ (IPA [t"!.$ e´$.t"!] ‘I’m sitting down’ with thesame separations, at syllable boundaries. The distinction is a syntacticone — the negative particle has a di¤erent syntactic distribution fromthe prefix, because it is free and not bound, and thus can be found sepa-rate from the verb, while the prefix cannot. Going on prosodic instinctand not knowing much about the language, we might class these two ex-pressions together, as Sapir seems to in transcribing the words; on furtherexploration, we find that syntax is as relevant as prosody in decidingwhere to divide words.Sapir does this almost immediately, of course, and later in the paper (in

the final text) he distinguishes do that is part of the word ‘nowhere’ fromdo that occurs independently before another quantifier: do /dAt ‘no-where’, but do t‘wı /de, ‘not everything’.


1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


Athabascanists have followed Sapir (as Sapir was following Goddard)in deciding where to put word breaks in Athabascan transcription, whicheventually led to Athabascan spelling. Strings that stand as words in ourexample language, Ahtna — that is, things that are written with spacesaround them — have the following properties.

(3) Properties of strings written as words in Ahtnaa. They may occur as headwords in the dictionary.

Example: dze!, ‘mountain’(Kari 1990: 172)The headword dze! and the surface form dze! are identical.Not all words occur as headwords in Kari 1990 and manyheadwords represent bound morphemes, both stems and a‰xes.

b. They can occur in di¤erent places within sentences.Example: question marker danatidaas da, ‘are you going back?’nen da natidaas, ‘are you going back?’xona da natidaas, ‘are you going back now?’(Kari 1990: 137)

c. They may be morphologically complete or free.Example: dats’eni ‘waterfowl’ (Kari 1990: 407) has theheadword ts’en, which does not occur alone or otherwiseprefixed or su‰xed. (Free ts’en does exist but it meanssomething entirely di¤erent.)

d. They may take a syntactic complement.Example: the postposition gha may take an a‰xal, one-word orphrasal complement.(i) "ts’ii c’aats’en’ xugha !ughayaa!

xu "ghathem"toward

‘He is walking toward them against the wind.’(Kari 1990: 122)(ii) Ggax gha tc’etl’ox.

ggax gharabbit for

‘He is setting something (snare) for rabbits.’(Kari 1990: 365)(iii) Kiize! ghaen xuk’eze ba yehwtalnigi gha.

xu"k’eze b"a yehwtalnigi ghathem"next-to to-him he will tell"REL for

‘They killed him because he would have told on them.’(Kari 1990: 312)

448 S. Tuttle

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


The complementation patterns in (3d) are part of a complex of phenom-ena that challenge us to figure out where the boundary lies between syn-tax and morphology in Ahtna. Other parts of the story include directobject marking and incorporation, which interact with syntax fairly regu-larly in Ahtna and most other Northern Athabascan languages.The generalizations shown in (3) are reminiscent of those brought to at-

tention in Di Sciullo and Williams (1987) about words in languages ingeneral. Lexical listedness, Di Sciullo and Williams found, was incidentalto other properties of words. Being a morphological object, made up ofpossible unanalyzed elements, was another property identified, and beinga syntactic atom, unanalyzable, was the third. Clearly some items that areAhtna words by the dictionary definition are also syntactic atoms (dze!).However, many of the listed atoms in Ahtna are a‰xes (like third personobject y-), and so while they may be syntactic atoms — if we can showthat they are organized by the syntax — they are not also words.To summarize: in this section I have tried to make clear why it is in-

cumbent on analysts of Athabascan verbal structure to make sense ofword boundaries encoded within the writing system. With the under-standing that no writing system can encode all the elements of linguisticstructure, syntactic and morphological facts have been depended upon indevising writing systems for Athabascan languages. The writing systemsare thus not arbitrary, though they all have failings, and it is as importantto address the regularities they reflect as it is to address the linguistic factsbehind historically important writing systems such as the one we use towrite English — something that is seldom questioned, in fact, but ratherregularly taken as evidence for linguistic structure.In the next section I will discuss two syntactic pictures of verbs in Atha-

bascan languages; one is designed to work specifically with Navajo, andone is more generally applicable to the whole language family, but bothdeal with some of the same issues.

4. Syntactic analyses of the Athabascan verb and their prosodicpredictions

Athabascan verbs require inflection (subject marking, major aspect, va-lence marking) in a position which is only sometimes on an edge. In Ta-ble 2 I show an overview of the Ahtna prefix complex, adapted from Kari(1990: 40–41). The first row contains the position numbers Kari uses forthe general group of a‰xes I include in the table; the second row includesnames for general categories.


1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


Tab

le2.

Overviewof

theAhtna

prefixcomplex

1110

–8

765

43

21

0$1to

$4

Post-positional

phrase

Adverb

and

Quan

tification

IncorporatedSubject,

Object,Them

atic

DirectObject/

OuterSubject

Qualifier

Aspect

Inner

Subject

Classifier

(Voice)

Verb

stem

Su‰xes

450 S. Tuttle

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


As an example, consider the contents of Table 3. In this example Ihave included the vowel e in position three as an imperfective marker,which follows my own analysis rather than Kari’s, but the relationshipof position three to the other template positions is una¤ected by thisdetail.In this example, an adverbial preverb neke- precedes the functional

middle of the verb, which includes information about aspect and subjectmarking. This inner-subject marking is a hallmark of Athabascan verbalmorphology, and causes much of the trouble having to do with mor-pheme order and typology, since subject inflection is generally predictedto be more peripheral to the structure of a word than a derivational a‰xthat helps carry the basic meaning of the expression.The syntactic or partly syntactic analysis of the complex Athabascan

verb is attractive because it o¤ers two unique advantages. First, itprovides a parallel treatment of syntactic relations inside and outside ofthe word. Second, it avoids the classic morphological divide betweenderivational and inflectional morphology, by describing the verb in non-morphological terms. Given the possibility of using syntactic, rather thanmorphological principles to derive the order of word-internal units, prefixorder can also be correctly predicted and the language family may notseem so typologically strange.Several researchers have spent time working on a syntactic picture

of the Athabascan verb. Willie (1989) uses syntactic trees to represent de-verbal nouns in Navajo. Speas (1990) uses syntax to represent both verbsand nouns in Navajo; Tuttle (1996) proposes a half-syntactic, half-morphological picture of a Northern Athabascan verb; Rice (2000) pro-poses a syntax-only verb structure based on data from many Athabascanlanguages; and Hale (2001) suggests an arboreal verb for Navajo which isclosely related to each of these others, and which also wraps up typologi-cal morphological generalizations developed by Speas (1990) and Mc-Donough (2003). Syntactically, Rice’s and Hale’s verbs are the most ambi-tious, and make the most complete predictions about the relationship ofsyntax to the surface word. For this reason I will summarize aspects

Table 3. Neketxaskaex, ‘I will turn around while paddling.’ Kari (1990)

10 4 3 3 2 0

neke t gh e s kaex

around,reversing

inceptive progressive imperfective 1sSub ‘Paddle,’progressivestem


1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


of just these two proposals, with the caveat that each of the other re-searchers mentioned have contributed to this general line of reasoningand its interesting prosodic consequences.The diagram shown in Figure 1 is adapted from Hale’s (2001: 680) in-

terpretation of Rice (2000)’s verb movement analysis for the Athabascanlanguage family. I have adapted the diagram by inserting an Ahtna verbin place of the Navajo ch’ıshidinı!dazh, ‘[He] jerked me out,’ which Haleuses as an example; my example and Hale’s are congruent as to thenumber and category of their component elements, including a preverbaladverb (Ahtna !u-, ‘around’), s- (‘me’), n- (qualifier), a- (what should beHale/Rice’s ‘‘Mode/Subject portmanteau’’; in this case progressive gh-and imperfective e- coalesced to a- following the qualifier); u-, the classi-fier or voice value; and -yaa!, the progressive stem. The Ahtna word addsup to ‘He is following me around.’Figure 1 shows a verb that contains conjunct and disjunct elements, as

a tree branching leftward, so that C-command and government flow gen-erally to the left. The verb stem and ‘‘classifier’’ (voice or valence mor-pheme) have raised to adjoin to subject agreement, which is here repre-sented as a portmanteau with what Rice (2000) would call PrimaryAspect (I think this was a slight imposition of Hale’s on Rice’s analysis,but it is irrelevant to our present problem). The movement involvedis long movement which takes place in two operations. By involvingmovement in the analysis, Rice makes it possible to deal with some of

Figure 1. Rice’s syntactic verb applied to an Ahtna example

452 S. Tuttle

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


the discontinuous dependencies found in the Athabascan verb, using theclassic method of showing related but distant elements both together (ind-structure) and apart (in s-structure).I show the Rice verb this way because in Rice (2000) there is no full

diagram of the verb that shows the movement that her analysis assumes;this also allows me to borrow from Hale’s interpretation of Rice’s pro-posal. What is important about Rice’s verb is that the linear order of pre-fixes ends up correct, through syntactic movement, with each linear posi-tion argued for. Rice’s major target, the puzzle of Athabascan verbalmorpheme order, is accounted for.What prosodic predictions does the Rice diagram make? If we take as a

very preliminary hypothesis that major constituents within the verb syn-tax should distinguish themselves somehow, then we might expect thatthe Mode/Subject phrase (not the top node, but the one that dominatesthe terminal Mode/Subject and Voice) might form a prosodic constitu-ent. It looks as if we should find a division of some sort between the qual-ifier position that immediately precedes Mode/Subject. Following thesame reasoning, we might expect to see the preverb-to-qualifier piece ofthe verb forming a constituent. Finally, the Voice phrase might form aconstituent. We shall see that the Ahtna facts support this last possibilitymuch more plausibly than the other two, because stem stress is so impor-tant to Ahtna prosody. However, there is no way for the syntactic struc-ture alone to predict that the Voice phrase should turn out to have a dis-tinctive prosodic shape, while the Qualifier phrase does not.Hale’s (2001) proposal abandons the linear order of morphemes for a

syntactic structure that does not require verb movement, and pairs thiswith a sort of lexical listing (p. 682, presented as ‘‘primarily expository’’)that distinguishes what he calls the nuclear and non-nuclear elementswithin a verb. A third component of his story is a set of phonologicalrules that serve to place the nuclear elements in the correct order withinhis V. V stands for a ‘‘conjunct verb,’’ which includes only the elementsup to position 4 in the Ahtna template given in (6). The use of three dif-ferent systems, even if the lexical listing is only expository, serves to showthe di¤erent kinds of dependencies that Hale observes in the Navajo verb.Presumably, the lexical diagram in Hale (2001) would correspond to theverb theme formalism, which Rice uses in an expository fashion (Rice2000, 16). Figure 3 shows Hale’s expansion of a complex Navajo verb(Hale 2001: 687). In neither case does the lexical formalism explain word-hood; it just lists the elements that will form the final expression, whichmay be a word or more than one word.Hale’s Navajo verb, with its V component, responds to the Navajo-

specific prosodic generalizations included in Speas (1990) and


1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


McDonough (2003), which separate the conjunct from the disjunct pre-fixes, by including the conjunct complex as a word-like constituent.Thus, there is a strong prediction in this model that the conjunct prefixesplus the stem should form a prosodic constituent. We shall see that theremay be some support for such a constituent in Ahtna, but the phoneticfindings are only suggestive at this point.While internal structures of these syntactic projections suggest relation-

ships to prosody, Rice’s and Hale’s arboreal verbs share the same prob-lem with respect to wordhood; they do not explain why a preverb (regard-less of its DS or SS position, regardless of its relation to V) should be partof the same word as the V. The prosodic corollary of Rice’s analysis (andHale’s, and all those that precede it) must be that some unambiguous sys-tem exists by which syntactically unified elements become prosodic words— or not.Rice herself (2000: 393) predicts that this system will be discoverable by

following up on the prosodic proposals made for Navajo by Speas (1990)and McDonough (2003). However, an examination of these proposalsshows that they concentrated on predicting morpheme order within the

Figure 2. Hale (2001) Navajo verb

454 S. Tuttle

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


larger verb, particularly within the complex built out of the verb stem andconjunct prefixes — not, actually, attempting to answer the same questionas the one we are thinking about here. As such, they fit into Hale’s (2001)proposal as the prosodic basis for the V constituent. When they reach the‘‘disjunct’’ prefixes, those to the left of the direct object position, mentionis made of clitic-like properties, which seems entirely appropriate, but it isnever made clear how we know which elements are clitics and which arefree particles.The question of how we find the edge of the verb is thus open for dis-

cussion. The next section presents some phonetic information aboutAhtna that suggests where we might look for prosodic word formation,and where it will not be much use to look.The idea that you can figure out what a word is, without having mor-

phological structure, is interpretable in a couple of di¤erent ways. With-out morphological structure, you have to find di¤erences between wordedges and word interiors which are available either in the morphophone-mic level of representation (which is basically what we spell) or the acous-tics of spoken language. In either case, you would have to be able to findsome property or sequence in Edge environments which is absent or dif-ferent in Middle environments. So the types of evidence available to us inthis investigation are twofold: acoustic patterns, which present a raw rec-ord of pronunciation, and patterns of spelling, which reflect facts aboutpronunciation through the medium of writing.

5. Acoustic patterns

5.1. Expectations

There is reason to believe that word edges are marked in some languageswith prosodic e¤ects (Fougeron 2001; Cho and Keating 2001; Tuttle2005a). Consonants are often longer and stronger at the beginnings ofstressed syllables, at the beginning of prosodic domains, including wordsin some languages, and at the ends of intonational units. Prosodic varia-tions in consonants are also found in all areas of the grammar. Conso-nants are often longer and stronger at the beginnings of stressed syllables.At the beginning of prosodic domains, including words, consonants maybe stronger. And at the ends of intonational units many languages displaysomething called ‘‘final lengthening’’ (Oller 1973), which can a¤ect bothconsonants and vowels. Thus, strength in consonants may signal promi-nence at the word, phrase or utterance level, just like length, loudnessand pitch changes in vowels.


1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


Both consonants and vowels may signal boundaries as well as promi-nence. When consonants are ‘bigger’ they may simply take longer to pro-nounce (a side e¤ect of stronger articulation). They may also show di¤er-ences from their less emphatic pronunciation, which may be less easy toenvision as hyperarticulations: n, for example, shows strength in somelanguages by become less nasal and more like d or t, and in others by be-coming more like a vowel, meaning louder and more sonorant.

5.2. Testing word-internal boundaries in Ahtna

Ahtna was first tested for word-level prosodic e¤ects in Tuttle’s (2002)study of stops and a¤ricates. This paper reported on a recording of aword list of incorporating Ahtna verbs (verbs which included a noun orsecond verb stem inside the prefixes, in addition to the main stem). Thelist was recorded in a session in March, 1993 by Gene Henry with the au-thor at the Mentasta School. The focus of the session was not on phonet-ics, but on the identity and pronunciation of verbs which incorporatenoun or verb stems, and thus the words were repeated a number of times.The words were embedded in English conversation and Ahtna sentences,so they include elements which are initial, final and nuclear within intona-tional phrases. The elicitation list came from Kari’s (1990) Ahtna dictio-nary. The set of consonants consulted contained 393 items, and the set ofvowels contain 292. Consonants were measured for total duration, voiceonset time (or VOT, a measure of aspiration) and closure where applica-ble. All consonants were in onset position. Vowels were measured for du-ration and fundamental frequency (the acoustic correlate of pitch).These data were sorted according to morphological and prosodic cate-

gories. The morphological categories are: Main stem, Incorporated stemand Prefix. These categories crossed with word-initial status, so ‘‘word-initial prefix’’ is a di¤erent morphological category from ‘‘word-initialstem.’’ The prosodic categories were: Utterance initial, phrase/utterancefinal, and noninitial. Data were digitized using Steinberg WaveLab 3.0.The syllable-initial consonants were measured for overall duration, clo-sure and VOT. Vowels were measured for duration (formant onset toend of the second formant), maximum amplitude, and F0 at maximumamplitude. Measurements were carried out in Scicon PCQuirer andPitchworks.The most significant finding in this data set had to do with stop and

a¤ricate closures. Di¤erences in closure duration correlate with di¤er-ences in morphological position in this study. Basic findings are shownin Table 4.

456 S. Tuttle

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


The statistically significant di¤erences in this study are between threepositions with long closures, and all other positions (analysis of variancewas significant at p < .0001; stem, and medial prefix following incorpo-rate, have closure di¤erences from the other positions significant atp < .0001). The longer consonants occur at the beginning of a mainstem, the beginning of an incorporated stem, and right after the end ofan incorporated stem. This position following the incorporate is very sa-lient in this data set. Word-initial prefixes, which could only be measuredfor closure when they were preceded by speech within a breath group, donot have long closures in comparison, and instead resemble other prefixeswithin words.It would be very tempting to interpret the long closure following the

incorporated stem as evidence for Hale’s V in Ahtna, because this posi-tion following the incorporate does pretty much line up with the disjunctboundary. While it is suggestive, it cannot be very convincing until it isreplicated in verbs that do not include incorporated stems (and, of course,with more data, since this is a very small study). We shall revisit this ques-tion later, in the third study to be discussed. We can say, however, thatthe stem is completely distinct in this data set, which can be interpretedas mild support for the Rice verb. The left edge of the verb is a washout,unless we could make a case for nonprominence (obscurity?) as a kind ofprosodic marking.

5.3. Text study (2003): word (stem) stress can be distinguished fromphrase edge marking

Tuttle (2003) looks at vowel duration, fundamental frequency and con-touring in an Ahtna text: ‘‘Putting up Salmon at Batzulnetas’’ is a narra-tive on upper Ahtna fishing told by Katie John of Mentasta, recorded in1982 and recently translated by James Kari, who generously provided the

Table 4. Mean and variance di¤erences for stops and a¤ricates, depending on morphologicalposition

Morphological position N Mean Standarddeviation

Word-initial prefix 32 30.2 38.2Main stem 89 64.7 48.4Incorporated stem 12 41.9 37.6Word-medial prefix 30 47.4 33.1Medial prefix following incorporate 34 97.2 28.9


1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


acoustic record for analysis. The text appears in published form in Kariand Simeone (2002).Despite the embedding of the incorporating forms in the incorporation

dataset within conversation, that study did not really allow the separationof e¤ects of stress from e¤ects of intonation. A further phonetic examina-tion of prominence e¤ects in a recorded text made it possible to evaluatee¤ects on the same word in di¤erent environments. Recorded text waschosen to build the data set rather than building a data set from wordsembedded in repeated phrases, a technique often used for learning aboutthe acoustics of consonants and vowels. It is understood that using a textmakes it di‰cult to get enough examples of all di¤erent types of conso-nants — the data set becomes more like a collection of rocks than a col-lection of experimental data points. However, with highly endangeredlanguages the question often arises whether newly recorded material, es-pecially elicited material, is ‘‘authentic’’ for the language of past fluentspeakers. Prosodic e¤ects are very fragile, and can get lost entirely in labspeech. For this reason, analysis of older text can be preferable sometimesto elicitation in spite of the problems it creates.The recorded text in this case was furnished with a full and complete

transcription — complete with the understanding that tiny phonetic de-tails are not always rendered in writing. In addition, in order to do theanalysis, information about structure below the word level is required.For each consonant and vowel measured, information was then sorted ac-cording to the following categories: the identity of a word, the syllableposition (final, medial, initial) of the vowel, the identity of the vowel, theintrinsic length of the vowel, morphological information about the vowel(stem or a‰x), and information about phrase position. Once this has beendone, quantitative analysis of recorded text is possible.For this study, information was sorted according to the following

categories: the identity of a word, the major class of the consonant, theidentity of the consonant, whether it is word-initial, word-final or word-medial, morphological information about the vowel (stem or a‰x), andinformation about phrase position.The main finding is that word stress and phrase prosody have di¤erent

realizations in this text. So stressed vowels (segregated for inherentlength) are longer than unstressed vowels, and much more likely to carrya falling contour, but they are not higher or lower in pitch than othervowels. When phrase-final and nonfinal stem vowels were compared, po-sition in a final stem did not appear to add significant length to vowels,nor is there an e¤ect on the contour, although final vowels are lower inF0 both at the beginning and at the end. Thus it appears to be possibleto separate e¤ects of Ahtna stress from e¤ects of intonation, based on a

458 S. Tuttle

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


spontaneously recorded text. Stressed vowels are associated with greaterlength, while final position is associated only with low tone. Table 5shows the durations of short vowels only. Stems were di¤erent fromprefixes at p < .0001 in Fisher’s PLSD; stems di¤ered from su‰xes atp % .01.This study reinforces the finding of stem prominence in Tuttle (2002),

and solidifies the sense that phonetic prominence e¤ects on stems are in-dependent of phrase intonation. It does not, however, answer some of ourother questions, raised by the first study on consonants. For this reason,we will need to go back to consonants, this time looking at text.

5.4. Word edges and middles in the Russians story (2004)

The last phonetic study to be reported returns to e¤ects on consonants,and attempts to answer the following questions:

– Do consonant measurements of text support earlier findings of un-remarkable left edges in Ahtna?

– Are there other consonant length/strength e¤ects which could markan edge as di¤erent from a verbal middle?

The data used for this recent study come from Katie John’s narration of‘‘Lazeni ’Iinn Natae!de Ghadghaande,’’ When Russians were Killed at‘Roasted Salmon Place’ (Batzulnetas). The text was recorded and tran-scribed by James Kari, and appears in published form in Kari (1986). Asin the earlier studies, information is sorted according to the followingcategories: the identity of a word, the major class of the consonant, theidentity of the consonant, whether it is word-initial, word-final or word-medial, morphological information about the vowel (stem or a‰x), andinformation about phrase position.

5.4.1. 2004 measurements. There were 356 consonants and vowelsmeasured in the Russians text for overall duration, and for durations of

Table 5. Mean durations of Ahtna short vowels in di¤erent morphological positions

Count Mean Standarddeviation

Prefix 123 67.7 28.1Stem 35 83.7 6.7Su‰x 17 74.2 38.4


1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


closure and voice onset time. An increase in overall duration, closure orrelease timing in a word-initial or word-final position would support theclaim that prosody identifies the left edge of a word in Ahtna.Stops, ejectives and a¤ricates which do not begin or end a large proso-

dic unit were measured together in this study. These consonants, whenthey occur in a‰xes, show no contrast in overall duration between word-initial and word-medial position, as shown in Table 6.These figures don’t tell us much, except that it is di‰cult to find a

word-final a‰xal consonant with a closure, and that if we want to findevidence to back up the 2002 findings for the disjunct boundary, we’llhave to look further. Looking at the data a slightly di¤erent way, we cantake all the consonants available in conjunct prefixes and measure theiroverall durations with a t-test over word-initial and word-medial position.This test gives us the results shown in Table 7. The t-test is not far fromsignificance at p % .0537.What does this comparison show? It is interesting that there are so few

word-initial conjunct consonants, but not really surprising, since thestoryteller’s verbs tend to be complex and finely shaded, requiring theuse of many preverbs. As to the consonant durations, it may be interest-ing to follow up the possibility that the edge of the conjunct complex car-ries some prosodic marking.However, as we shall see below, this part of the Ahtna verb is marked

morphophonologically in such a way that a crude measurement like con-sonant length is doomed to be confounded. It is quite likely that while thestem boundary is marked unequivocally by consonant fortition, the dis-junct boundary is marked otherwise.

Table 6. Stops and a¤ricates in prefixes in the Russians story

Count Mean closure Standarddeviation

Word-initial 30 45.4 38.3Word-final 3 4.3 4.3Word-medial 45 47.5 5.8

Table 7. Conjunct prefix consonants in the Russians story

Count Mean Standarddeviation

Word-initial 7 74.5 ms 59.8Word-medial 37 108.4 6.1

460 S. Tuttle

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


5.5. Summary of phonetic evidence

On the basis of these three small studies of Ahtna phonetics, it looks asif morphologically defined prominence — that is, stem stress — is asalient fact for the speakers recorded. This is consistent with Kari’s de-scription of the language. Since main stress is morphologically assigned,stem stress and morphological prominence are really the same thing.There is some suggestion that a boundary e¤ect could exist at the leftedge of the conjunct prefixes, but this has not yet been confirmed. The be-ginning of a word is not a prominent position, unless it coincides with thebeginning of a stem. These studies did not consider the phonetics of wordendings.

6. Morphology and phonology

Phonological definition of a word need not be limited to suprasegmentale¤ects, or to segmental evidence of prosodic systems. Words are alsostructured by phonological and morphological patterns, such as thefollowing:

– Distribution of phones depending on morphological position– Di¤ering syllable structures depending on morphological position– Position-specific distribution of functional morphemes

If we are to solve the problem of how an Ahtna speaker-hearer segmentsher language into words, we need to look at these areas, all of which aremore promising than the facts of fortition. The first of the three is sug-gested by studies of Navajo, a language in which prefix consonants infact do consist of a subset of the consonants that can begin stems.This strategy has limited success with Ahtna. Looking into the second

set of patterns takes us frankly into the area of referencing morphology,and will be more successful. Surprisingly successful, however, will be a fo-cus on the functional morphemes found at the end of the word. Ahtnasu‰xes are limited in number, giving us a chance to locate ends of wordswith much greater facility than beginnings of words.It must be clear that exploring these lexical and morphological patterns

requires us to discuss principles that have to do with words, as well aswith sentences. The experience of this writer suggests that the learner ofAhtna needs to refer to principles in all modules of language structure,so that reductive models really cannot provide enough information to leta person get into the language.


1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


Tab

le8.

Ahtna

conson

antsin

IPA/practicalorthog

raph

y

Lab

ial

Alveolar

Alveo-Palatal

Lateral

Palatal

Uvu

lar

Glottal

Stopsan

da¤

ricates

Plain

pb

td

tsP

t§dz

t´dl

c%

q%%

&’

Aspirated

tht

tshP

t§h

tst´

htl

ch

cqh

k

Glottalized

t’t’

ts’P

t§’

ts’

t´’

tl’

c’c’

q’

k’

Nasals

mm

n

Fricatives

Voiced

zP

‰z

‚%h

Voiceless

sP

§s

´!

¯x

hh

Approximan

tsl

lj

y

462 S. Tuttle

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


6.1. Distribution of phones depending on morphological position

The consonant phonemes of Ahtna are shown in Table 8.All these phones occur in stem-initial position. Other elements found in

the writing system but not in stem-initial position include hw (IPA [ w]) yh(IPA [c]) and ng (IPA [n]). yh occurs word-finally; hw is only found inprefixes; ng is found in both positions.Table 9 shows a table of Ahtna consonants found in prefixes. As

this table shows, the majority of the consonants do show up in pre-fixes. There is no clear restriction on manner or laryngeal features.Stem-final position, which is often word-final, has few restrictions, the

major one being that aspirated and unaspirated stops and a¤ricates areboth unaspirated in this position. Final ejectives are pronounced as ejec-tives in some dialects (Kari 1990; Tuttle 2005b); in others, the glottalcomponent of the consonant occurs as laryngealization on the precedingvowel (Tuttle 2005b). The presence of this laryngeal feature, which is notfound in prefix sequences, along with odd allophones like yh, along with ageneral richness of inventory, gives stem-final position a certain amountof phonological distinctiveness. However, the most salient feature of stemsyllables is their larger-than-life status as the main stress domain of theword, as discussed above.Generally, inventorial distinctions in themselves do not give us very

much of Ahtna word structure, unless we know the identity of prefixes.We can get much more out of the unusual syllable structures to be dis-cussed in the next section.

6.2. The other kind of evidence: string search

So if phonetics cannot be relied on to define a word in this language, andif we stick to the claim that wordhood must be phonologically definable,what else can we use? The other two places to look are in word-level pho-nology and in the a‰x lexicon.Spelling can, with some di‰culty, identify particular sequences in

Athabascan verbs that signal internal structure. It can also point toareas where substitution sets are more and less limited: stems belongto an open category, as do adverbial prefixes, but aspectual and sub-ject agreement markers, and category-changing enclitics, belong toclosed classes and are for this reason less numerous (and at thesame time, may be far more frequent). We will look first at clusteringpatterns.


1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


Tab

le9.

Ahtna

conson

antsin

prefixes

Lab

ial

Alveolar

Alveo-Palatal

Lateral

Palatal

Uvu

lar

Glottal

Stopsan

da¤

ricates

Plain

pb

td

&’

Aspirated

tht

ch

cqh

k

Glottalized

t’t’

ts’P

t§’

ts’

c’c’

q’

k’

Nasals

nn

n%

Fricatives

Voiced

zP

‰z

‚%h

Voiceless

w

hw

sP

§s

´!

¯x

hh

Approximan

tsl

lj

y

464 S. Tuttle

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


6.2.1. Consonant clusters. Consonant clusters in Ahtna occur espe-cially in two particular environments: at the left edge of a verb stem, andat the left edge of the conjunct complex. (4) shows stem-initial clusters.

(4) Stem-initial clustersa. Zdaa ‘He or she is sitting’

/z" daa/stative"‘singular sit’

b. Txasdaa! ‘I will sit’/t" gh" s" daa!/inceptive"progressive"1sS" ‘singular sit’

The left edge of the conjunct complex requires more discussion. The pre-fixes in Table 5 are at the edge of what is often referred to as the conjunctprefix domain. To the left of this domain is what is called the disjunct do-main. When there are no prefixes from the disjunct domain present in aword, either the conjunct edge or the stem edge may be leftmost in averb word; it depends on what else the verb theme contains. Clusters arepossible in either position, whether or not other prefixes precede.The position class diagram in Table 10, based on Kari (1990: 40–41),

shows consonantal prefix positions in this object-qualifier zone of whichmany could conceivably co-occur.Actually, because of morphological and phonological requirements,

consonant clusters in this part of the Ahtna verb rarely are more thantwo consonants long. However, there are a lot of possible combinations.These combinations are not found in other environments in the language.Example (4) shows mid-prefixal clusters around the edge of the conjunctcomplex.

(4) Mid-Prefixal clusters (Kari 1990):a. ’stayii!

/ts’" t" gh" yii!/1pS"inceptive"progressive" ‘eat’‘We’ll eat it’

b. na’studae!de/naa ts’" t" u" dae!" de /‘back’a 1sS" inceptive" optative" ‘plural go’ "optative‘Let’s go back’

Can this restriction on clustering be used to identify word edges? It turnsout that it can’t, again because of the nature of Ahtna morphology. Theproblem with prefixing languages and spelling is that one time one part ofthe word is at the left edge, and one time another part is out there. The


1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


Tab

le10

.Clusteringenvironm

entat

theconjun

ctedge

(Hale’s‘‘V’’)

5F5E

5D5C

5A4F

4D4C

4B4A

DirectObject

FirstPlural

Subject

Indefinite

Subject

ThirdPlural

Human

Subject

Areal

or

qualifier

Inceptive

Qualifier

Qualifier

Qualifier

ys

ts’

c’k

kt

dn

ghb

nz

knhw

c’hw

ni!

466 S. Tuttle

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


left edge, unlike the stem edge, is not unambiguously marked by particu-lar segments.Stem-initial clusters in Ahtna occur both word initially (if there is no

more to the word than consonantal forms of prefixes can express) and in-ternally (if there is more which must be added). Therefore, the presence ofa consonant cluster is not a cue to the word edge. It is, instead, a cue to amorphological environment.In (4a), the sequence ’st occurs at a word edge, because the word hap-

pens to begin with the first person plural subject marker. In (4b), the samesequence occurs inside the word, because it is preceded by the adverbialna-. So the clustering we are investigating can’t be taken as an unambig-uous clue to word edges; however, it does represent a prosodic correlateto morphological position, so it worth looking into.There is another type of ambiguity to be aware of. Despite the re-

stricted set of prefixes involved in clustering, it is still possible to find iden-tical or near-identical sequences in di¤erent morphological positions. (5)shows a string 3dgh4 which can be found in at least two morphologicalenvironments.

(5) Cluster ambiguity3dgh4: disjunct boundary, stem boundarya. dadghi’aani

‘lock’b. ghadghaande

‘when they were killed’

In (5a), dadghi’aani, the 3dgh4 cluster represents a d-qualifier and gh-conjugation combination. This is a pre-stem example (the last syllable inthis word is a nominalizing su‰x). However, in the title of the story I’vetalking about, the same sequence occurs at a stem boundary where the D-classifier bumps up against the gh-initial stem ‘kill’: ghadghaande. Syllablecount doesn’t really help with this situation (we might be tempted toguess that the last syllable would be the stem, but this is false for both(5a) and (5b). So, what the prefixal clusters can signal is that the speakerhas arrived at a syllable which will soon be followed by a stem, or is astem. They can’t tell you which unless you know the identity and the spe-cific phonology of the prefixes in question.

6.3. Prefix summary

There are two areas in the verbal prefix complex in Ahtna which areprone to consonant clusters: around the left edge of the conjunct prefixes,


1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


and at the stem boundary. Consonant clusters are clues to the disjunctboundary and the stem boundary. However, cluster appearance doesn’talways give away word structure.

6.4. Help from su‰xes: restricted a‰x sets

We have found nothing to help us catch the beginning of an Ahtna word,but we may hope that the ends of words, which precede the beginnings ofother words, may help the listener identify what she’s hearing.Because verb and noun stems are stressed, we might hope to identify a

left word edge with a previous stress. This won’t work for two reasons:first, not all words carry stress (we have totally ignored the postpositionsand other particles in this discussion, but there exist quite a few low-stress, frequent words) and second, stems are very often nonfinal in bothverbs and nouns (especially deverbal nouns).The good news, for the perceiver looking for word edges, is that there

are relatively few su‰xes. An exhaustive list, from Kari (1990: 40–41) ispresented in Table 11.Su‰xes are handy because they form words. In particular, su‰x posi-

tions 3 and 4 are noun and clause forming in function. These formatives,probably far more than verb stems, make good landmarks for finding theright ends of words.Finding word edges this way is, however, not a prosodic strategy; it is a

lexical strategy. Learn the su‰xes and find the edges. The prosodic mark-ing of the stem followed by one of this small set of su‰xes can give agood clue to the right edge of the verb. Since a new word must begin aftera verbal su‰x, the cue to the right edge is also a cue to the left edge.

7. Conclusion

Acoustic, phonological and lexical data from Ahtna text and lexiconshow that a purely prosodic word-recognition strategy is ine¤ective inidentifying word edges in this language. This weakens the case for syntac-tic word formation, because it is necessary to appeal to components otherthan the prosodic to say how speakers know where a word begins andends. However, there are several facts that, taken together, help definethe spelled word. Acoustically, we found that consonants are pronouncedmore distinctly at the beginnings of stems and (perhaps, tentatively) atthe beginning of the conjunct complex, and that vowels are lengthenedin stressed syllables.

468 S. Tuttle

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


By looking at spelled strings, we learned that it is possible to identify apre-stem syllable even without knowing what any of the prefixes are, bymeans of searching for consonant clusters; clusters occur in predictabledomains, including both the stem edge and the conjunct edge. We alsofound that su‰xes are more limited than prefixes, and because they endwords, they may provide a way to catch a cue to the beginnings of wordsto follow. The impression is of an interactive strategy for word identifica-tion that builds on word-level morphology, lexical information and word-internal prosody.Both of the acoustic findings regarding consonants are suggestive for

further development of the interiors of syntactic word formation models.Stem prominence could be pursued as justification for the Rice model, andthe acoustic evidence for the conjunct edge (supported as it is by morpho-phonology) may support the Hale V constituent. However, the latter ismuch more tenuous finding and requires considerable further support.Considered alone, the prosodic evidence for the unity of the Ahtna

verb is not strong enough to identify it unambiguously. Given the com-plexity of the structure under discussion, it would seem wise to exploitall modules of linguistics that can o¤er explanation, and to assume thatAthabascan languages structure sounds, words and sentences in specificways that follow specific principles.

Received 2 December 2004 University of FairbanksRevised version received18 November 2007

Note

* Correspondence address: Alaska Native Language Center, P.O. Box 747680, Universityof Fairbanks, Fairbanks, Alaska 99775-7680, USA. E-mail: ¤[email protected].

Table 11. Su‰x positions (Kari 1990: 41)

Su‰xposition

1 2 3 4

Class "vsf1 "vsf2 "vsf3 "vsf4

String zero, s, !, x, t, ’,n: aspectualsu‰x to verbroot

(h)e negative (y)i, non-humanrelative; nen, humanrelative; ne, humanrelative plural; den,place

Xu, general; dze’,in; tah, at timeswhen; da,interrogative; gi,perhaps


1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


References

Cho, Taehong and Keating; Patricia (2001). Articulator and acoustic studies on domain-initial strengthening in Korean. Journal of Phonetics 29, 155–190.

Di Sciullo, Anna-Maria and Williams, Edwin (1987). On the Definition of Word. Cambridge:MIT Press.

Fougeron, Cecile (2001). Articulatory properties of initial segments in several prosodic con-stituents in French. Journal of Phonetics 29, 10–135.

Goddard, Pliny Earl (1905). Morphology of the Hupa Language. University of CaliforniaPublications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 3. Berkeley, CA: Universityof California Press.

Hale, Kenneth (2001). Navajo verb stem position and the bipartite structure of the Navajoconjunct sector. Linguistic Inquiry 32(4), 678–693.

Hargus, Sharon and Tuttle, Siri G. (1997). Augmentation as a‰xation in Athabaskan lan-guages. Phonology 14(2), 177–220.

Kari, James (1986). Tatl’ahwt’aenn Nenn’, the Headwaters People’s Country. Fairbanks:Alaska Native Language Center.

—(1990). Ahtna Athabaskan Dictionary. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center.Kari, James and Simeone (2002). aaMcDonough, Joyce (2003). The Navajo Sound System. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Oller, D. Kimbrough (1973). The e¤ect of position in utterance on speech segment durationin English. JASA 54(5), 1235–1247.

Radlo¤, Leopold (1874). Worterbuch der Kinai-Sprache. Memoires de l’Academie Imperialedes Sciences de St. Petersbourg, VIIe serie, tome XXI. No. 8, A. Schiefner (ed.), 1–33.[Copy in Alaska Native Language Center Archive with Ahtna forms annotated by JamesKari.]

Rice, Keren (2000). Morpheme Order and Semantic Scope. Berlin and New York: Moutonde Gruyter.

Sapir, Edward (1914). Notes on Chasta Costa phonology and morphology. University ofPennsylvania Museum Anthropological Publications 2(2), 271–340.

Speas, Margaret J. (1990). Phrase Structure in Natural Language. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Tuttle, Siri G. (1996). Direct objects in Salcha Athabaskan. In Athabaskan LanguageStudies: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Young, Eloise Jelinek, Sally Midgette, KerenRice, and Leslie Saxon (eds.), 101–121. Albuquerque, NM: University of New MexicoPress.

—(2002). Prosody of incorporated structures in Ahtna Athabaskan. In Proceedings of theAthabascan Languages Conference, Fairbanks, June 2002, Gary Holton (ed.), aa–aa. Fair-banks: Alaska Native Language Center.

—(2003). Realizations of stress and intonation in an Ahtna text. Paper presented at Societyfor the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas annual meeting, Atlanta, GA.

—(2005a). Duration, intonation and prominence in Apache. In Athabaskan Prosody,Sharon Hargus, and Keren Rice (eds.), 345–368. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

—(2005b). Coronal ejectives in Ahtna Athabaskan. Journal of the Acoustical Society ofAmerica 117, 2489.

Willie, Mary (1989). Why there is nothing missing in Navajo relative clauses. In AthapaskanLinguistics: Current Perspectives on a Language Family, E. D. Cook and Keren Rice(eds.), 407–437. Trends in Linguistics. State-of-the-Art Reports 15. Berlin and NewYork: Mouton de Gruyter.

470 S. Tuttle

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42


phonetics and word definition in ahtna athabascan

Documents