Research

Templates in Central Sierra Miwwok

Central Sierra Miwwok (CSM) verbs display apparent templatic morphology where the shape of the verbal stem expones tense, aspect and mood (Freeland 1951).

Present Past Habitual Nominal

tujaːŋ- tujaŋː- tujːaŋ- tujŋa-

I show evidence that there are more than the four basic verb stem shapes than Freeland reports.

Distributed Morphology-style approaches (Bye and Svenonious 2010) are too restrictive to handle the extent of possible URs.

Ongoing research includes determining which frameworks, if any, can account for the templatic effects in CSM verbal stems.

Recent handout here.

Label-Free Prosody

with Chris Golston

Alignment and Match theories (Selkirk 1986, 2005) of the syntax prosody interface rely on labeled syntax to derive labeled prosody. However, Minimalism and Bare Phrase structure (Chomsky 1995) abandon syntactic labels, making deriving labeled prosody from unlabeled syntactic structure difficult at best (Munn 1993).

We propose a theory of prosodic constituency that relies on syntactic structure rather than labels to derive Intonational Phrases.

We showcase this new theory of prosody by showing that it can account for clause internal pauses - a crucial indication of IPs (Nespor and Vogel 1986) - in English as well as accounting for phrase final lengthening in Central Sierra Miwwok

Slides here.

Pitch-Accent in Hidatsa

Previous analyses of pitch in Hidatsa have posited a lexical pitch and spreading ruled (Park 2012) or Swedish-like ptich tunes (RIvera 2019).

An accoustic analysis confirms 3 of Rivera 2019's posited tunes, though finds no evidence for a "late accenting" or "final more accenting" class. Further, there is no evidence of the pitch spreading claimed by Park 2012.

Proceedings paper here.

Ancestral Puebloan ruins at Chaco Canyon National Park

Stress in Hidatsa

Hidatsa stress has been variably described as fixed (Boyle 2007) and non-existent (Park 2012). However, a careful acoustical analysis shows that stress is predictable.

I find that stress in Hidatsa manifests as increased intensity of the stressed vowel. The stressed syllable is predicted by left-aligned iambs. In short, if the first syllable of a word is light (containing a short vowel and no coda), then the second syllable is stressed. If the first syllable is heavy (containing a long-vowel, diphthong or coda), then it is stressed.

The effects of stress in Hidatsa are so robust, that they override the inherent sonority of the vowel (stressed [i] is louder than stressed [a]).

Thesis here.

Unstressable Words in CSM

Freeland (1951) reports that words of a certain shape (LH) fail to receive a primary stress. Rather, they receive only secondary stress which can fall on either the first or final syllable.

Hayes (1995) analyzes Freeland's claims as a case of "Unstressable Word Syndrom": where extrametricality and iambic stress conspire to prevent regular stress assignment.

I show that these words are in fact stressed regularly. However, CSM has a H*L pitch tune that misalign when there is not enough material for the entire tune to dock faithfully. This results the high tone being realized on the syllable preceding the stressed syllable, leading to the impression of diminished stress on either or both syllables.

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