Tashlhiyt Berber Research Articles

Clear speech and phonological typology: A case study of Tashlhiyt Berber

Clear speech is a type of listener-oriented, intelligibility-enhancing mode of speaking. It has been shown to enhance the perceptibility of many different types of phonological contrasts, cross-linguistically. An open question is whether all phonological contrasts are enhanced to an equivalent extent in clear speech. In the current study, we ask whether rarer phonological patterns receive less of a clear speech intelligibility boost, relative to more common phoneme contrasts. Tashlhiyt Berber is an Afroasiatic language spoken in Morocco. Tashlhiyt has been well studied for having typologically uncommon phonotactic properties. This study examines the effect of clear speech on the discrimination of rarer lexical contrasts in Tashlhiyt Berber. We predict that the more typologically uncommon contrasts (e.g., word pairs containing complex and geminate initial onsets) will have a smaller increase in perceptibility from casual to clear speech than more common contrasts (e.g., singleton contrasts). Furthermore, native and naive listeners’ (here, American English speakers) discrimination of these contrasts across speech styles is also compared. Cross-language perception of clear speech provides a window to understanding the phonetic bases for cross-linguistic typological patterns.

The secret morphology of Tashlhiyt Berber

Abstract Two secret languages used in Tashlhiyt Berber are reported in work by Douchaïna (1996, 1998) and Lahrouchi & Ségéral (2009, 2010ab): Tagnawt and Taqjmit. I propose that they should both be analyzed as instances of prosodic morphology, employing the same prosodic morpheme [L.LL.L]. Prosodic morphemes are common in the regular morphology of Tashlhiyt: the prosodic foot [LL] for the imperfective and Tifrdi, the prosodic word [H.H] for Ukris, and [L.H.L] for Tirrugza, Abnakli and Azddayru (Jebbour 1999, Dell & Elmedlaoui 1992). The prosodic shape [L.LL.L] of the secret languages fills out the paradigm as a variant of [L.H.L], which appears marginally in the secret languages. The shapes [L.LL.L] and [L.H.L] are found also in Tashlhiyt verse metrics, where they form a natural class of verse feet, alternating with the anapest [LL.H] (Dell & Elmedlaoui 2008, Riad 2017). Based in part on the striking shape parallels in Tashlhiyt, I argue that there is an organic connection between prosodic morphemes and the prosodic categories employed in verse. Furthermore, the simultaneous prosodic structures that we find in verse metrics—regular prosody and meter—are applicable also to prosodic morphology, particularly clearly so in root-and-pattern formations.

Asymmetric inflection in Berber

Abstract In Tashlhiyt Berber nouns, grammatical gender is usually expressed on both edges of the noun by the segment /t/. However, at the right edge, there is another, more minor pattern: many grammatically feminine nouns end in a vowel. The regular realization involves a final /t/ associated to a suffixal CV unit. Vowel-final feminine nouns are derived when a final stem vowel is associated to the V position of the suffix, blocking the association of the /t/. This right-edge effect is a mirror-image of Bendjaballah’s (2011) analysis of the left-edge inflection of vowel-initial stems. The distribution of gender marking in loans provides further supports to this analysis.

Clear speech in Tashlhiyt Berber: The perception of typologically uncommon word-initial contrasts by native and naive listeners

Tashlhiyt Berber is known for having typologically unusual word-initial phonological contrasts, specifically, word-initial singleton-geminate minimal pairs (e.g., sin vs ssin) and sequences of consonants that violate the sonority sequencing principle (e.g., non-rising sonority sequences: fsin). The current study investigates the role of a listener-oriented speaking style on the perceptual enhancement of these rarer phonological contrasts. It examines the perception of word-initial singleton, geminate, and complex onsets in Tashlhiyt Berber across clear and casual speaking styles by native and naive listeners. While clear speech boosts the discriminability of pairs containing singleton-initial words for both listener groups, only native listeners performed better in discriminating between initial singleton-geminate contrasts in clear speech. Clear speech did not improve perception for lexical contrasts containing a non-rising-sonority consonant cluster for either listener group. These results are discussed in terms of how clear speech can inform phonological typology and the role of phonetic enhancement in language-universal vs language-specific speech perception.

Autosegmental-metrical phonology – Unpacking the boxes

AbstractAutosegmental-metrical phonology has shown itself to be a highly successful framework for the description, analysis and comparison of the prosody of many of the world’s languages. What has contributed to the success of this framework is the fact that there is widespread use of prepackaged units within the model – referred to as “complex primitives”. The intonation systems of languages are described as havingedge tonesand, in some cases, also (post-lexical)pitch accents. These are defined in terms of both their association properties and their cueing function within the prosodic system. Edge tones associate with an edge (or a tone bearing unit at the edge) and are a cue to the juncture between prosodic constituents. Pitch accents associate with a head (usually a stressed syllable) and are a cue to prominence. I shall argue that we need to unpack these definitions, providing evidence from Tashlhiyt Berber, Maltese and Italian, languages in which the association properties and cueing functions of intonational tones do not automatically line up in this way.

Not as you R: Adapting the French rhotic into Berber

This article examines the adaptation of the French rhotic in Berber. In loanwords borrowed from French, the uvular fricative is systematically interpreted as a coronal tap, despite the fact that Berber has phonemic /ʁ/ and /χ/. It is argued that this phenomenon is determined by phonological rather than phonetic factors. It is shown that Tashlhiyt Berber speakers, including monolinguals, are able to identify the French r as a sonorant, based on their native phonology, where many co-occurrence restrictions are analyzed in terms of sonority-sensitive dependency relations between the most sonorous segment and its neighboring segments.

Development of phonetic complexity in Arabic, Berber, English and French

AbstractThe goal of this study is to provide crosslinguistic data on the acquisition of phonetic complexity among children acquiring four different languages: Tunisian Arabic, Tashlhiyt Berber, English, and French. Using an adaptation of Jakielski's (2000) Index of Phonetic Complexity (IPC), we carried out an analysis to assess phonetic complexity of children's early vocabulary in the four languages. Four different samples from each language were analyzed: 50 words selected from an adult dictionary of each language, 50 words from child-directed speech, 50 words targeted by the child, and the child's actual pronunciations of those 50 words. Globally, we hypothesized that children's early productions would be shaped by universal articulatory constraints, but also by the language they are exposed to, depending on its phonological complexity. Our findings show that Arabic displays higher degrees of complexity compared to Berber, English and French, and that children acquiring Arabic target and produce more complex words than children learning Berber, English and French.

The variability of syllable patterns in Tashlhiyt Berber and Polish

In this study we investigate the timing of word-initial clusters and its relation to distinct phonological syllable parses in Tashlhiyt Berber and Polish. To this end, we use experimental, articulographic data (steps 1 and 2) combined with computer-based simulation (step 3). In step 1, we test how temporal properties of consonantal clusters such as overlap can vary within a single language. In step 2, we relate articulatory coordination patterns to distinct phonological syllable parses, involving simple and complex onsets, in order to calculate stability indices for each language. In step 3, we test the robustness of these stability patterns by adding anchor variability to the system. The analysis reveals that variability plays a different role in the two languages. Tashlhiyt shows a tight cluster timing with low variability in overlap across clusters. The phonetic heuristics for Tashlhiyt reveal a simple onset parse with a phonetic outcome that is strikingly robust against temporally induced variability. In contrast, Polish shows a considerably high variability in overlap between the different cluster types. The phonetic heuristics for Polish reveal a general trend towards a complex onset parse, but this time the picture is less clear. Furthermore, the Polish timing patterns are more sensitive to anchor variability than Tashlhiyt. This difference in the degree of sensitivity to variability is interpreted to be the result of different language-specific regulatory mechanisms mediating between different levels of description, such as segmental context and prosodic marking of different pragmatic functions. Natural human communication requires both stability and variability regulated by different needs and constraints within a given language, leading to differing degrees of flexibility in the hierarchical network of local weights and clocks attached to the different constituents of the prosodic hierarchy.

Question Word Intonation in Tashlhiyt Berber: Is ‘high’ good enough?

The present study investigates the intonational marking of question words (qwords) in Tashlhiyt Berber. The first part of the study identifies a number of possible prosodic patterns on qwords as employed in conversational contexts. When they occur in a direct interrogative, qwords are marked with a rise in pitch towards a H(igh) target and a subsequent fall. By contrast, when the qword is embedded, no tonal targets occur on it. The second part consists of a detailed investigation of the alignment and scaling of qwords in utterance-initial position and in narrow focus. While the H target is consistently present somewhere on the qword, neither a local F0 maximum nor a high plateau region is characterized by stable alignment with any specific position in the segmental string. Scaling of the starting point (%L) and endpoint (H) of the rise characteristic of the qword exhibited a dependency on alignment: The rise is somewhat truncated if the peak is aligned early in the word. This study’s results shed more light on the intonation system of Tashlhiyt and support earlier findings suggesting that tonal placement in this language is prone to a typologically unusual degree of variability.

The meter of Tashlhiyt Berber songs

I present an analysis of Tashlhiyt Berber meter, based on the corpus of ‘straight’ meters collected and analyzed by Dell and Elmedlaoui (2008). There are 56 meters (35 independent, 21 dependent), which are systematically related to each other. Based on the many shared properties of all straight meters and their individual inflexibility, I suggest that they all derive from the same general metrical template, much in the same way as proposed by Deo (2007) for several Sanskrit meters. The individual meters are thus different realizations of the general meter, where the modulation of line length is part of the realizational variation (unlike the case in Sanskrit). I also argue that the generalizations pertaining to the system of meters can be better understood, and more broadly formulated, in terms of the phonology of the language, in three areas. First, the Tashlhiyt straight meters are rhythmic in a very specific sense: they all obey NoClash. Several previously unconnected facts—verse foot shapes, avoidance of two heavy syllables in sequence, and the regular alternation of verse feet—follow from this single fact. Second, the meters are pervasively binary, with a strong preference for tetrameter, a fact that is not predicted by models where line length is stipulated (e.g. Hanson and Kiparsky 1996; Fabb and Halle 2008). Line length tendencies follow from the linguistic constraints on binarity, under the assumption that metrical templates are derived from the prosodic hierarchy, rather than externally, e.g. from a specific meter-generating module (e.g. Kiparsky 1977; Blumenfeld 2015). This would indicate that meter is derived from grammar in just the same way as prosodic morphemes. Third, and related to the second point, the regular prosody and the meter are simultaneously present in a line of verse, a common assumption. However, the fact that both structures come out of the linguistic grammar means that grammar operates in both domains (like in root-and-pattern morphology), rather than there being a matching between them. Meter obeys some constraint to a higher degree than does regular prosody, instantiating overall improvement in the particular respect addressed by the chosen constraint. In the straight meters of Tashlhiyt Berber, this privileged constraint is NoClash (as also in Tegnér’s Swedish hexameter), whereas in other systems the constraint may concern e.g. the alignment of prominence at some level (Darío’s Spanish alexandrines, Strindberg’s Swedish hexameter).

Characteristics and Trajectories of four dimensions of Addiction-Prone Personality Scale

In this study we investigate the timing of word-initial clusters and its relation to distinct phonological syllable parses in Tashlhiyt Berber and Polish. To this end, we use experimental, articulographic data (steps 1 and 2) combined with computer-based simulation (step 3). In step 1, we test how temporal properties of consonantal clusters such as overlap can vary within a single language. In step 2, we relate articulatory coordination patterns to distinct phonological syllable parses, involving simple and complex onsets, in order to calculate stability indices for each language. In step 3, we test the robustness of these stability patterns by adding anchor variability to the system. The analysis reveals that variability plays a different role in the two languages. Tashlhiyt shows a tight cluster timing with low variability in overlap across clusters. The phonetic heuristics for Tashlhiyt reveal a simple onset parse with a phonetic outcome that is strikingly robust against temporally induced variability. In contrast, Polish shows a considerably high variability in overlap between the different cluster types. The phonetic heuristics for Polish reveal a general trend towards a complex onset parse, but this time the picture is less clear. Furthermore, the Polish timing patterns are more sensitive to anchor variability than Tashlhiyt. This difference in the degree of sensitivity to variability is interpreted to be the result of different language-specific regulatory mechanisms mediating between different levels of description, such as segmental context and prosodic marking of different pragmatic functions. Natural human communication requires both stability and variability regulated by different needs and constraints within a given language, leading to differing degrees of flexibility in the hierarchical network of local weights and clocks attached to the different constituents of the prosodic hierarchy.

Differential Difficulties in Perception of Tashlhiyt Berber Consonant Quantity Contrasts by Native Tashlhiyt Listeners vs. Berber-Naïve French Listeners.

In a discrimination experiment on several Tashlhiyt Berber singleton-geminate contrasts, we find that French listeners encounter substantial difficulty compared to native speakers. Native listeners of Tashlhiyt perform near ceiling level on all contrasts. French listeners perform better on final contrasts such as fit-fitt than initial contrasts such as bi-bbi or sir-ssir. That is, French listeners are more sensitive to silent closure duration in word-final voiceless stops than to either voiced murmur or frication duration of fully voiced stops or voiceless fricatives in word-initial position. We propose, tentatively, that native speakers of French, a language in which gemination is usually not considered to be phonemic, have not acquired quantity contrasts but yet exhibit a presumably universal sensitivity to rhythm, whereby listeners are able to perceive and compare the relative temporal distance between beats given by successive salient phonetic events such as a sequence of vowel nuclei.

Tonal association in Tashlhiyt Berber: evidence from polar questions and contrastive statements

The placement of F0 peaks in Tashlhiyt Berber is highly variable, both within and across speakers, even across repetitions of the same target sentence. We show that peak placement is determined by a number of competing factors: in addition to a general tendency for the peak to be placed on the rightmost syllable – a tendency that is stronger in questions than in statements – the peak is attracted to the syllable with the most sonorous nucleus and preferentially to heavy syllables. Moreover, in words consisting entirely of obstruents, there are three possible intonation patterns: no F0 peak at all, an anticipated peak (before the target word) or a peak on a vocoid between two obstruents. The F0 peak is analysed phonologically as a H tone that is either associated with a postlexically determined syllable or, if the syllable is not tone-bearing, aligned with the edge of the larger domain.

Who needs a nucleus? Tashlhiyt Berber syllabification within the onset prominence representational environment

AbstractThis paper presents an analysis of Tashlhiyt Berber syllabification in the Onset Promi-nence (OP) representational framework. With a structural perspective on manner of articulation, OP captures the apparent role of sonority in TB syllabification. It is shown, however, that this does not entail the assignment of "peak" status to the most sonorous available segments in a given string. Sonority based "peak" assignment cannot account for the ambiguous behavior exhibited by syllables in with the "peak" is less sonorous than its "onset", and makes infelicitous predictions with regard to the behavior of "onsetless" syllables. By contrast, the OP environment provides mechanisms in which such ambiguities fall out from more general principles of constituent formation.

Frontiers in Comparative Metrics 2, in memoriam Lucyllae Pszczołowskae (April 19–20, 2014, Tallinn University, Estonia)

The second international conference on comparative prosody was organised by the Department of Cultural Theory of Tallinn University and the Department of Classical Philology of the University of Tartu and held in Tallinn in April 2014. The first such conference took place in Estonia in 2008, and was devoted to the memory of the prominent Russian scholar Mikhail Gasparov (1935– 2005); the proceedings were published three years later (Lotman & Lotman 2011). The present conference was devoted to the memory of another important representative of international verse studies, the Polish scholar Lucylla Pszczolowska (1924–2010). The main topics of the conference included verse theory and methods of verse analysis, frontiers in Indo-European and Fenno-Ugric prosody as well as non-European poetic systems, the poetics of written and oral texts, cognitive poetics, and the analysis of the verse structures of translated texts and their originals. The keynote speakers were Nigel Fabb (University of Strathclyde, U.K.), Tomas Riad (Stockholm University, Sweden), and Paul Kiparsky (Stanford University, USA). The conference was opened by Nigel Fabb’s talk, “Lines and other layers of the poetic text: their differentiated formal, aesthetic and psychological properties”. The speaker developed Roman Jakobson’s distinction between verse design (resp. verse instance) of the poet and delivery design (resp. delivery instance) of the reciter (Jakobson 1960: 366–367), and explored whether metrical verse in performance, when line boundaries are not cued auditorily, is experienced differently from prose in performance. According to Fabb, the surface forms are nevertheless heard relative to the distinct lines required for the formal processing of the metrical verse (a phenomenon sometimes described as “metrical tension”). Tomas Riad delivered a talk on the prosodic metrics of Tashlhiyt Berber songs, in which he silently opposed Jakobson’s bold statement “that versification cannot be deduced in its entirety from a given language” (Jakobson 1923: 118), and analysed the prosody of Berber songs in line with the assumptions of “phonological” metrics, where metre is derived directly from language Studia Metrica et Poetica 1.2, 2014, 144–157

The ‘‘Aḥwash’’ Berber singing ceremony shift from Morocco to Israel

This paper is a survey of the complex dynamics of change and/or conservation within the traditional Berber musical genre of dancing songs, called Aḥwash, as this musical genre is still performed in Morocco and among certain Moroccan Berber-Jewish communities emigrated to Israel in the mid 1950’s and early 1960’s. The conclusion is that while this musical genre is nowadays undergoing substantial formal and functional changes in its homeland, Morocco, giving rise, on the melodic and rhythmic levels, to a kind of ‘‘new aḥwash’’, as opposed to the amrg aqqdim (‘‘old [Tashlhiyt Berber] music’’) in general, the aḥwash ceremony in Israel was frozen by the performers on those levels as it was during the 50’s, and the 60’s of the 20th century. Therefore we are witnessing in Israel an aḥwash aqqdim (‘‘old aḥwash’’), at least as concerns its repertories of lyrics and melodies. Some changes have affected however certain external aspects and some ethno musicological functional dimensions in the Israeli aḥwash. For example: some participants’ dressing mode (men in particular), place of performing (indoors instead of outdoors), the weakening of the dimension of gender in roles assignment, etc.1. The term ‘‘Berber-Jewish’’, for the targeted community, is here but a convenient cover term to make short. For a discussion of some controversial concepts such as ‘‘Berber Jews’’, ‘‘Jewish Berbers’’ or ‘‘Berber speaking Jews’’, see Elmedlaoui 2013.

Phonetic alignment and phonological association in Tashlhiyt Berber

Although Tashlhiyt Berber uses intonation to mark sentence modality, the location of f0 events is severely constrained by its notorious predominance of consonantal nuclei (cf. (1) where syllable nuclei are underlined) (1) [ts.sk.∫ f.tstt] “you dried it (fem.)” Here we report on the alignment of f0 peaks in disyllabic target words in polar questions and contrastive statements in the language. Data from four native speakers revealed that questions tend to have later f0 peaks than statements. This was reflected in discrete association patterns when more than one tone bearing unit was available: in questions the f0 peak occurred significantly more often on the final syllable than in statements. Interestingly, if no association distinction was made, there was a difference in alignment of this peak within a tone bearing unit: the peak was aligned significantly later in questions. Thus, discrete phonological association patterns were mirrored by phonetic alignment detail. These data question the traditional dichotomy between phonological association and phonetic alignment.

A representational parameter for onsetless syllables

Syllables without consonantal onsets may be invisible for stress-assignment, reduplication, or tone. Many authors attribute this behavior to some sort of prosodic deficiency, while having little to say about cases in which onsetless syllables act as well-formed constituents. In the Onset Prominence (OP) representational environment, the ambiguous behavior of onsetless syllables is explained by means of a single representational parameter. Prosodically active initial vowels are assumed to be specified for the Vocalic Onset (VO) layer of structure, a specification lacking in prosodically inert onsetless syllables. Diverse phonological implications of VO specification for KiKerewe, Eastern Arrernte, Tashlhiyt Berber and Polish are examined. In the case of Polish, phonetic data on the glottalization of initial vowels provide additional support for the representational proposal. Finally, the place of the OP environment within the context of modern phonological theory is discussed.

Syllables and Gemination in Imperfective Stems in Tashlhiyt Berber

In Tahlhiyt Berber certain verbs form their imperfective stem by geminating one consonant. Since Dell and Elmedlaoui 1988, accounts of imperfective gemination have been based on syllable structure. Lahrouchi (2010) proposes an alternative analysis based on a binary-branching head-complement structure that regulates the distribution of consonant types in verbal roots. This paper argues that the syllable-based account is preferable and that it makes the head-complement structures advocated by Lahrouchi redundant.

Acoustic correlates of stress and pitch accent in Tashlhiyt Berber

This paper reports results of a phonetic study of stress and pitch accent in Tashlhiyt Berber, an Afro-Asiatic language that is famous for possessing words consisting of only obstruents. This study examines evidence for word-level stress and phrase-level accent in Tashlhiyt and addresses the question of how both prosodic properties are acoustically realized in segments, such as obstruents, that provide a relatively impoverished backdrop for the manifestation of prominence. Results indicate that F0 is raised in the phrase-final nucleus relative to both the penultimate nucleus of the phrase and also to word-final nuclei that are phrase-medial. This raising of F0 is consistently observed on sonorant nuclei, inconsistently associated with voiced obstruents, and absent from voiceless obstruents, which lack an F0 but often trigger insertion of an epenthetic vowel to aid in the realization of F0 information. A further result is that intensity is higher in the nucleus of a word-final syllable relative to one in the penult of a word. We interpret the greater intensity associated with word-final syllables as a marker of word-level stress and the raising of F0 in phrase-final syllables as a phrase-level pitch accent docking on the final stressed syllable of a phrase.