Prosodic Interactions in Anishinaabemowin Verbs

Abstract

This research aims to better understand the link between prosody and verbs in Anishinaabemowin by investigating pitch placement in relation to verb placement in Anishinaabemowin utterances. The data is from a story by Ogimaawigwaebiik archived in Dibaajimowinaan; Anishinaabe Stories of Culture and Respect. 
 Anishinaabemowin, also known as Ojibwe, is a member of the Algonquin language family and is spoken throughout Southern Ontario and the Northern United States (Fairbanks, 2017). It is a polysynthetic language meaning it primarily uses affixes to convey meaning, particularly on the verbs. Prosody is the organization of various linguistics units (words, pitch, tone) into an utterance in the process of speech production. It conveys not only linguistics information but also contextual cues, intentions and attitudes (Fujisaki, 1997). 
 This research utilized two audio softwares, Audacity and Praat, to clean and segment the audio into utterances and then token sentences were selected based on verb placement (verb initial, verb second and verb final). These token sentences will be analyzed for pitch placement and then compared to see if verb placement affects prosody, further expanding on the current literature which states that pitch defaults to the verb (Frazier, accepted). This research is particularly important because there is a gap in existing literature on prosody in Anishinaabemowin and there are no experimental studies such as this.