MULL-lab will be meeting this Tuesday, November 22nd at 3:30 pm. Meetings will take place in Rm. 002 of the Linguistics department, with a Zoom room open for those unable to join us in person.
This week, David will be presenting a talk entitled:’The Southern Tutchone rhyme: A nominal perspective’. The abstract is below.
In this talk, I address the limited claims made regarding the status of vowels and post-vocalic consonants in Southern Tutchone, a Dene (Athabaskan) language spoken in the southern Yukon. First, I discuss claims that the vowels form two distinct categories: full and reduced. This distinction is prevalent in the study of Dene languages, however its phonological reflex is less clear. I argue that full vowels are underlyingly long and reduced vowels are underlyingly short. Second, I examine the status of the orthographic post-vocalic consonants: <l, t, n, r>. The observation that these are the only permitted word-final consonants arose from development of the orthography, and formal implications have not been investigated. I propose that only these consonants are possible post-vocalically due to nominal stems having a constraint on the licensing of place features. Taken together, these points form the core of an ongoing project into rhyme constraints in Southern Tutchone. Data is drawn from recent fieldwork in Whitehorse, Yukon.
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