Topics in the phonology and phonetics of Coatzospan Mixtec

Abstract

This dissertation examines the phonology and phonetics/phonology interface in Coatzospan Mixtec (CM). I focus on two major prosodies, glottalization and nasalization, in CM. First, I provide detailed phonological analyses of both within the context of Optimality Theory, OT (Prince and Smolensky 1993). This is important because often the treatment of a subset of data obscures more problematic aspects of a system. For example, the analysis of nasalization extends our understanding of how constraints can combine in a grammar. I motivate the conditional union of two Alignment (McCarthy and Prince 1993a) constraints to characterize attested patterns of root nasality, while ruling out impossible forms. The treatment of glottalization explores the implications of freedom of input in OT. I show that we cannot equate input with underlying; encoding the traditional sense of underlying representation requires viewing UR's as sets of optimal inputs lexical items. Regarding the phonetics/phonology interface, I pursue dual goals. Chapter 3 extends Grounding (Archangeli and Pulleyblank 1994a) to the opportunistically grounded relation between glottalization and stress. Although not inherently sympathetic to stress, glottalization is optimally realized under stress in the phonology of CM. Chapter 4 extends grounding by using sequential grounding (Smolensky 1993) to characterize the behavior of opaque consonants. Second, building on research in phonetic implementation (Pierrehumbert 1980, Keating 1990b), I show that a phonologically specified (+constricted glottis) must be implemented for only a part of the duration of the specified vowel. Similarly, orality targets in CM fricatives are also implemented at segment edges. The data support a view where targets are temporally located within segments (Huffman 1989). However, the location of targets may vary from edge to edge. Voiced fricatives implement orality upon release; voiceless fricatives do so at the onset of closure. The data also argue for a more complex notion of the relationship between phonetic data and phonological information than that of Cohn (1990). Partial implementation of a feature in a segment does not entail the phonetic rather than phonological presence of that feature. Phonetic data must be interpreted in the context of the phonological system from which they derive.