Abstract
Vowel elision is common in Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara connected speech. It also appears to be a locus of language change, with young people extending elision to new contexts; resulting in a distinctive style of speech which speakers refer to as muṯumuṯu (‘short’ speech). This study examines the productions of utterance-final past tense suffixes /-nu, -ɳu, -ŋu/ by four older and four younger Pitjantjatjara speakers in spontaneous speech. This is a context where elision tends not to be sociolinguistically or perceptually salient. We find extensive variance within and between speakers in the realization of both the vowel and nasal segments. We also find evidence of a change in progress, with a mixed effects model showing that among the older speakers, elision is associated with both the place of articulation of the nasal segment and the metrical structure of the verbal stem, while among the younger speakers, elision is associated with place of articulation but metrical structure plays little role. This is in line with a reanalysis of the conditions for elision by younger speakers based on the variability present in the speech of older people. Such a reanalysis would also account for many of the sociolinguistically marked extended contexts of elision.
Highlights
This study investigates phonetic variability in utterance-final past tense suffixes /-nu,-ïu, -Nu/ in Pitjantjatjara, a Western Desert (Pama-Nyungan) language of Central Australia
Word- or phrase-final vowel elision has been documented in several Australian languages as a phonetic process in connected speech, and as an outcome of historical sound change
The phenomenon of word- and/or utterance-final elision is common across Australian languages, and our phonetic analysis in this study shows how gradient these productions can be, and how such a change in progress might happen between generations of speakers
Summary
This study investigates phonetic variability in utterance-final past tense suffixes /-nu,-ïu, -Nu/ in Pitjantjatjara, a Western Desert (Pama-Nyungan) language of Central Australia. Word- or phrase-final vowel elision has been documented in several Australian languages as a phonetic process in connected speech, and as an outcome of historical sound change. In current day Pitjantjatjara, there are signs of both regular vowel elision in connected speech and an ongoing change in progress extending the contexts of this elision. Alongside these processes, there are signs of vowel elision in contexts which tend not to be perceptually salient to native speakers and listeners. Our first aim in this paper is to provide a fine-grained acoustic phonetic analysis of vowel elision in one of these highly variable but not sociolinguistically or perceptually salient contexts. If there is evidence of a change in progress, what does this change look like?
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