Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-k7p5g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-08T23:46:31.330Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Ternary vowel length in Shilluk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2019

Bert Remijsen*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Otto Gwado Ayoker*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Signe Jørgensen*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh

Abstract

Ternary or three-level vowel length is typologically rare, and supporting evidence is limited. This paper presents the results of an investigation into the hypothesised case of this configuration in Shilluk. We first describe the role of vowel length in Shilluk phonology and morphology, and then report on an acoustic study in which minimal sets for vowel length (short, long, overlong) are measured for vowel duration, coda duration, vowel quality and fundamental frequency. Short, long and overlong vowels differ significantly and substantially in terms of vowel duration: 96% of the items can be classified successfully for vowel length on the basis of this measurement alone. Of the other measurements, only vowel quality is significant, and this effect is considerably smaller. The mean values for vowel duration – 68, 111 and 150 ms for short, long and overlong vowels respectively – are similar to those reported for ternary vowel length in Dinka.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We thank the people who took part in data collection: Augustino Changjwok Otin, Elisabeth Antipas Onak, Francis Boyoumo Opiti, James Olwak Laa, Josephina Romano Oywac, Maria Bocay Onak, Peter Mojwok Yor, Stephen Okwen Agwet, Teresa Akic Awanh and Yoana Nyathaji Kolang. We are also grateful to SIL South Sudan for sponsoring our research visits to South Sudan and for hospitality in Juba. We gratefully acknowledge the Leverhulme Trust, which supported this research financially through the research grant ‘A descriptive analysis of the Shilluk language’ (RPG-2015-055).

References

REFERENCES

Andersen, Torben (1987). The phonemic system of Agar Dinka. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 9. 127.Google Scholar
Andersen, Torben (1990). Vowel length in Western Nilotic languages. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 22. 526.Google Scholar
Andersen, Torben (1992–94). Morphological stratification in Dinka: on the alternations of voice quality, vowel length and tone in the morphology of transitive verbal roots in a monosyllabic language. Studies in African Linguistics 23. 163.Google Scholar
Baal, Berit Anne Bals, Odden, David & Rice, Curt (2012). An analysis of North Saami gradation. Phonology 29. 165212.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Davidson, D. J. & Bates, D. M. (2008). Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language 59. 390412.Google Scholar
Bao, Zhiming (1999). The structure of tone. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Barr, Dale J., Levy, Roger, Scheepers, Christoph & Tilly, Harry J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language 68. 255278.Google Scholar
Bates, Douglas (2005). Fitting linear mixed models in R: using the lme4 package. R News 5:1. 2730.Google Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Mächler, Martin, Bolker, Benjamin M. & Walker, Steven C. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67. 148.Google Scholar
Becker-Kristal, Roy (2010). Acoustic typology of vowel inventories and Dispersion Theory: insights from a large cross-linguistic corpus. PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Blevins, Juliette (2004). Evolutionary Phonology: the emergence of sound patterns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David (2015). Praat: doing phonetics by computer (version 5.4.22). http://www.praat.org.Google Scholar
Childers, Donald G. (1978). Modern spectrum analysis. New York: IEEE Press.Google Scholar
Clements, G. N., Michaud, Alexis & Patin, Cédric (2010). Do we need tone features? In Goldsmith et al. (2010). 3–24.Google Scholar
Cohen, Jacob (1994). The earth is round (p < .05). American Psychologist 49. 9971003.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard, Haspelmath, Martin & Bickel, Balthasar (2015). The Leipzig glossing rules. https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php.Google Scholar
Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. (1995). Vowels as complex segments in Nilotic. In Nicolaï & Rottland (1995). 147–168.Google Scholar
Dixon, R. M. W. (2010). Basic linguistic theory. Vol. 2: Grammatical topics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Duanmu, San (2009). Syllable structure: the limits of variation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Elenbaas, Nine & Kager, René (1999). Ternary rhythm and the lapse constraint. Phonology 16. 273329.Google Scholar
Elert, Claes-Christian (1964). Phonologic studies of quantity in Swedish. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Flack, Kathryn (2007). Templatic morphology and indexed markedness constraints. LI 38. 749758.Google Scholar
Gilley, Leoma G. (1992). An autosegmental approach to Shilluk phonology. Arlington: Summer Institute of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Gilley, Leoma G. (2004). The feature of stress in Nilotic. In Anyanwu, Rose-Juliet (ed.) Stress and tone: the African experience. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe. 99120.Google Scholar
Goldsmith, John A., Hume, Elizabeth & Leo Wetzels, W. (eds.) (2010). Tones and features: phonetic and phonological perspectives. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin (1996). Word-class-changing inflection and morphological theory. Yearbook of Morphology 1995. 4366.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce (1989). Compensatory lengthening in moraic phonology. LI 20. 253306.Google Scholar
Hermans, Ben & Torres-Tamarit, Francesc (2014). Ternary constituents are a consequence of mora sluicing. In Kingston, John, Moore-Cantwell, Claire, Pater, Joe & Staubs, Robert (eds.) Proceedings of the 2013 Meeting on Phonology. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/amp.v1i1.26.Google Scholar
Heuven, Vincent J. van (2014). Acoustic correlates and perceptual cues of word and sentence stress: mainly English and Dutch. In Gussenhoven, Carlos, Chen, Yiya & Dediu, Dan (eds.) Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages. 211–217. Available (November 2018) at http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/tal_2014.Google Scholar
House, Arthur S. (1961). On vowel duration in English. JASA 33. 11741178.Google Scholar
House, Arthur S. & Fairbanks, Grant (1953). The influence of consonant environment upon the secondary acoustical characteristics of vowels. JASA 25. 105113.Google Scholar
Hyman, Larry M. (2006). Word-prosodic typology. Phonology 23. 225257.Google Scholar
Hyman, Larry M. (2010). Do tones have features? In Goldsmith et al. (2010). 50–80.Google Scholar
Kohler, Klaus J. (2001). Überlänge im Niederdeutschen? In Peters, Robert, Pütz, Horst P. & Weber, Ulrich (eds.) Vulpis Adolatio: Festschrift für Hubertus Menke zum 60. Geburtstag. Heidelberg: Winter. 385402.Google Scholar
Kohler, Klaus J. & Tödter, Regina (1984). Experimentalphonetische Untersuchungen zur ‘Überlänge’ im Nieder- und Hochdeutschen Schleswig-Holsteins. Arbeitsberichte Institut für Phonetik der Universität Kiel 21. 61131.Google Scholar
Lehtonen, Jaakko (1970). Aspects of quantity in Standard Finnish. Jyväskylä: Jyväskylä University Press.Google Scholar
Letterman, Rebecca S. (1994). A phonetic study of Sinhala syllable rhymes. Working Papers of the Cornell Phonetics Laboratory 9. 155181.Google Scholar
Lobanov, Boris M. (1971). Classification of Russian vowels spoken by different speakers. JASA 49. 606608.Google Scholar
Lowenstamm, Jean (1996). CV as the only syllable type. In Durand, Jacques & Laks, Bernard (eds.) Current trends in phonology: models and methods. Salford: ESRI. 419441.Google Scholar
McCloy, Daniel R. (2016). Package ‘phonR’: tools for phoneticians and phonologists. R package (version 1.0-7). https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/phonR/phonR.pdf.Google Scholar
Mackenzie, Sara (2016). Consonant harmony in Nilotic: contrastive specifications and Stratal OT. Glossa 1(1):12. 138. http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.8.Google Scholar
Maddieson, Ian (1985). Phonetic cues to syllabification. In Fromkin, Victoria A. (ed.) Phonetic linguistics: essays in honor of Peter Ladefoged. Orlando: Academic Press. 203221.Google Scholar
Miller, Cynthia L. & Gilley, Leoma G. (2001). Evidence for ergativity in Shilluk. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 22. 3368.Google Scholar
Miller, Cynthia L. & Gilley, Leoma G. (2007). Evidentiality and mirativity in Shilluk. In Payne, Doris L. & Reh, Mechthild (eds.) Advances in Nilo-Saharan linguistics. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe. 191206.Google Scholar
Monich, Irina Vitta (2017). Vowel length in Nuer. In Jesney, Karen, O'Hara, Charlie, Smith, Caitlin & Walker, Rachel (eds.) Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Meeting on Phonology. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/amp.v4i0.4006.Google Scholar
Nicolaï, Robert & Rottland, Franz (eds.) (1995). Actes du Cinquième Colloque de Linguistique Nilo-Saharienne. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe.Google Scholar
Nooteboom, S. G. (1972). Production and perception of vowel duration: a study of the durational properties of vowels in Dutch. PhD dissertation, University of Utrecht.Google Scholar
Noske, Manuela (1995). Consonant gemination in Shilluk. In Nicolaï & Rottland (1995). 217–243.Google Scholar
Odden, David (2011). The representation of vowel length. In van Oostendorp, Marc, Ewen, Colin J., Hume, Elizabeth & Rice, Keren (eds.) The Blackwell companion to phonology. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. 465490.Google Scholar
Ortega-Llebaria, Marta & Prieto, Pilar (2011). Acoustic correlates of stress in Central Catalan and Castilian Spanish. Language and Speech 54. 7397.Google Scholar
Prehn, Maike (2012). Vowel quantity and the fortis–lenis distinction in North Low Saxon. PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
R Core Team (2016). R: a language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. http://www.r-project.org.Google Scholar
Reid, Tatiana (2010). Aspects of phonetics, phonology and morphophonology of Thok Reel. MSc dissertation, University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Remijsen, Bert (2013). Tonal alignment is contrastive in falling contours in Dinka. Lg 89. 297327.Google Scholar
Remijsen, Bert (2014). Evidence for three-level vowel length in Ageer Dinka. In Caspers, Johanneke, Chen, Yiya, Heeren, Willemijn, Pacilly, Jos, Schiller, Niels O. & van Zanten, Ellen (eds.) Above and beyond the segments: experimental linguistics and phonetics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. 246260.Google Scholar
Remijsen, Bert & Ayoker, Otto Gwado (2014). Contrastive tonal alignment in falling contours in Shilluk. Phonology 31. 435462.Google Scholar
Remijsen, Bert & Ayoker, Otto Gwado (2018). Forms and functions of the base paradigm of Shilluk transitive verbs. In A grammar of Shilluk. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. Available (November 2018) at http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24777.Google Scholar
Remijsen, Bert, Ayoker, Otto Gwado & Jørgensen, Signe (2018). Shilluk_2016_controlled_ThreeLevelVowelLength. (Dataset.) Edinburgh Datashare. http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/ds/2424.Google Scholar
Remijsen, Bert, Ayoker, Otto Gwado & Mills, Timothy (2011). Shilluk. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 41. 111125.Google Scholar
Remijsen, Bert & Gilley, Leoma G. (2008). Why are three-level vowel length systems rare? Insights from Dinka (Luanyjang dialect). JPh 36. 318344.Google Scholar
Remijsen, Bert, Miller-Naudé, Cynthia L. & Gilley, Leoma G. (2015). Stem-internal and affixal morphology in Shilluk. In Baerman, Matthew (ed.) The Oxford handbook of inflection. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 577596.Google Scholar
Remijsen, Bert, Miller-Naudé, Cynthia L. & Gilley, Leoma G. (2016). The morphology of Shilluk transitive verbs. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 37. 201245.Google Scholar
Rice, Keren (2014). Sounds in grammar writing. In Nakayama, Toshihide & Rice, Keren (eds.) The art and practice of grammar writing. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 6989.Google Scholar
Schaeffler, Felix, Wretling, Pär & Strangert, Eva (2002). On the development of a quantity typology for Swedish dialects. In Bernard Bel & Isabelle Marlien (eds.) Speech prosody 2002. Aix-en-Provence. 627–630. Available (November 2018) at http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/sp2002.Google Scholar
Torres-Tamarit, Francesc & Jurgec, Peter (2015). Lapsed derivations: ternary stress in Harmonic Serialism. LI 46. 376387.Google Scholar
Tucker, A. N. (1955). The verb in Shilluk. Mitteilungen des Instituts für Orientforschung 3. 421462.Google Scholar
Venables, W. N. & Ripley, B. D. (2002). Modern applied statistics with S. 4th edn. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Warnes, Gregory R., Bolker, Ben, Bonebakker, Lodewijk, Gentleman, Robert, Huber, Wolfgang, Liaw, Andy, Lumley, Thomas, Maechler, Martin, Magnusson, Arni, Moeller, Steffen, Schwartz, Marc & Venables, Bill (2016). Package ‘gplots’: various R programming tools for plotting data. R package (version 3.0.1). https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/gplots/gplots.pdf.Google Scholar
Whalen, D. H. & Levitt, Andrea G. (1995). The universality of intrinsic F0 of vowels. JPh 23. 349366.Google Scholar
Windmann, Andreas, Šimko, Juraj & Wagner, Petra (2015). Polysyllabic shortening and word-final lengthening in English. Proceedings of Interspeech 2015. 36–40. https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/interspeech_2015/i15_0036.html.Google Scholar
Winter, Bodo (2013). Linear models and linear mixed effects models in R with linguistic applications. Available (November 2018) at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1308.5499.pdf.Google Scholar
Xu, Tongling (2017). Number marking in Shilluk. MA dissertation, University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Yip, Moira (1980). The tonal phonology of Chinese. PhD dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Yu, Alan C. L. (2008). The phonetics of quantity alternation in Washo. JPh 36. 508520.Google Scholar