Abstract
This paper investigates two vowel devoicing processes in Cheyenne, which appear on the surface to be fundamentally different, occurring in distinct segmental and prosodic environments. One process occurs in phrase-final vowels in any segmental environment, while the other occurs only before voiceless consonants in the surface penultimate vowels of some words. The first is consistent with typological expectations and is phonetically grounded, whereas the second is at first glance, neither typologically expected nor phonetically motivated. I provide a unified Stratal Optimality Theory account of these processes, demonstrating that both can, in fact, be treated as cases of domain-final devoicing, and attributed to the same family of positional markedness constraints. Different rankings of the markedness constraints relative to a faithfulness constraint result in different segmental conditions for the two processes. Moreover, I suggest that the two processes may be related via Domain Generalization, whereby a phonetically motivated utterance-final effect phonologizes and extends to smaller prosodic domains. In this way, while the word-level process is not itself phonetically motivated, it can be understood as an extension of another phonetically motivated process in the same language.
Highlights
Vowel devoicing has been the subject of typological investigation as far back as Greenberg 1969, and more recently in Gordon 1998 and Chitoran and Marsico 2010
This paper investigates two vowel devoicing processes in Cheyenne, an Algonquian language spoken in Montana and Oklahoma (Leman 2011)
It has been observed that devoicing of certain vowel qualities and quantities implies devoicing of others, and that devoicing in certain prosodic positions implies devoicing in other positions. Another generalization, which is the focus of this paper, is that most, if not all, vowel devoicing processes involve adjacency either to other voiceless consonants or to the edge of a prosodic domain, or both (Greenberg 1969; Gordon 1998)
Summary
Vowel devoicing has been the subject of typological investigation as far back as Greenberg 1969, and more recently in Gordon 1998 and Chitoran and Marsico 2010. This work has demonstrated that both phonetic and phonological processes of vowel devoicing across the world’s languages typically fit into one of the following two categories in terms of the environments in which they occur: a) adjacent to voiceless consonants, and b) adjacent to the right edge of a prosodic domain. The second process, referred to as penultimate devoicing (PD) in the Cheyenne literature, occurs before voiceless consonants, but only in the penultimate syllable of some words (e.g., in [vóhpomaʔohtse] ‘salt’ but not [mohoʔohtse] ‘part of Ursa Major,’ Fisher et al 2017)) In this way, it is at first glance neither typologically expected nor phonetically motivated.
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