Obstruent and rhotic contrasts in Adnyamathanha, a language of South Australia

Abstract

Adnyamathanha is one of the Thura-Yura languages, spoken in the northern Flinders Ranges of South Australia. It has a fairly complex consonant system with six places of articulation (including four coronals). Through a combination of traditional phonological analysis and acoustic phonetic measurement, we attempt to throw some light on one aspect of this complexity. We show that there is a contrast between two series of obstruents in intervocalic position, which sets Adnyamathanha apart from most other languages of the region—and of the Pama-Nyungan language family as a whole. The main phonetic correlates of the contrast are closure duration and presence versus absence of glottal pulsing during the closure. Voiceless obstruents are consistently realised as long stops, whereas their voiced counterparts, though always shorter, vary in duration and manner of articulation, depending on place of articulation. We analyse the voiced labial fricative as the voiced equivalent of the voiceless (bi)labial stop and we analyse the alveolar tap and the retroflex flap as voiced cognates of the voiceless alveolar and retroflex stops respectively. Thus, although we recognise the existence of four phonetically distinct rhotic sounds, we assign only the alveolar trill and the retroflex glide to the phonological category of rhotics.