Initial weakening in Mixtecan languages

Abstract

Prosodic boundaries influence patterns of consonantal strengthening and weakening across languages (Fougeron and Keating, 1997; Kakadelis, 2018; Katz and Fricke, 2018; Keating et al., 2003; White et al., 2020). Onset obstruents/nasals in prosodically prominent positions are lengthened and produced with greater contact between active and passive articulators (Fougeron and Keating, 1997; Fletcher, 2010; Keating et al., 2003; Lavoie, 2001). Typically, articulatory strengthening occurs in utterance-initial and word-initial position while weakening/reduction occurs in word-medial position (Katz and Fricke, 2018). We provide phonetic evidence that certain obstruents in word-medial, pre-tonic position are both lengthened and strengthened in Itunyoso Triqui, an indigenous language of Mexico, while word-initial obstruents are often shorter and reduced. We examined 67 min (8933 segments) from a spontaneous speech corpus produced by nine native speakers; and measured duration, voicing lenition, and spirantization. Onset consonants were lengthened slightly in stem-final (stressed) syllables but shortened elsewhere. For sonorant consonants, no utterance-initial lengthening was observed. These findings agree with previous work on a related Mixtecan language—Yoloxochitl Mixtec (DiCanio et al., submitted)—and pose unique challenges for views hypothesizing that consonantal strengthening is either (a) universal or (b) serves to enhance word-level parsing (Katz and Fricke, 2018; White et al., 2020).