Gabriela Caballero

Perceptual functionality of morphological redundancy in Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara)

A recent cross-linguistic survey suggests redundant marking of the same meaning by multiple morphological markers to be more widely attested than commonly believed. While this phenomenon (referred to as multiple (or extended) exponence in the morphological literature) has been examined within the context of morphological theory and diachronic research, little work has investigated the processing of morphological redundancy and synchronic motivations for its use. This paper reports a field speech-in-noise experiment to assess perceptual functionality of redundant markers in an agglutinating, morphologically complex language of Northern Mexico, Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara). This language possesses morphological patterns in which a meaning is redundantly cued by two consecutive suffixes, and where the second (outer) suffix is optional. We show that the effect of adding the optional suffix varies with the overall likelihood of recognising its meaning in context: cue redundancy helps when recognition of the cued meaning is difficult but hurts when recognition of the cued meaning is easy. The results are interpreted as support for the operation of Grices Maxim of Clarity in spoken word recognition and/or production: the listener expects the speaker to say only as much as is necessary to transmit the message.

Tone and Stress in Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara) Word Prosody1

This paper presents the word-prosodic system of Choguita Rarámuri, a Uto-Aztecan language that displays both stress-accent and tone with complex morphological conditioning. While closely related languages have been documented to possess culminative word prominence involving both stress and contrastive tone (Demers, Escalante, and Jelinek 1999 and Hagberg 1989), no variety of Rarámuri had been described as featuring lexical tone. On the basis of phonological evidence and a detailed acoustic investigation, we propose that (i) stress-accent and tone are phonologically distinct systems in Choguita Rarámuri; (ii) stress-accent and tone are independent in terms of their acoustic encoding; (iii) both stress-accent and tone are governed in their distribution and makeup by lexical and morphological conditions; (iv) the tone system features a three-way contrast between HL, L, and M; and (v) lexical tonal contrasts are exclusively realized in stressed syllables—that is, tonal distribution is dependent on stress-accent.

A Construction-Based Approach to Multiple Exponence

This study brings to bear Optimal Construction Morphology (Caballero and Inkelas 2013) on the phenomenon of multiple exponence (ME), in which the same morphological property is exponed by more than one morphological component of a complex word. ME is a prevalent phenomenon that should receive central coverage in any morphological theory. OCM is well suited to capture ME through its intrinsic architecture of local optimization choices driven by the goal of achieving a target meaning for each word that the morphological grammar is tasked with producing. Each type of ME elucidated in Harris (Multiple exponence. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017) is discussed and shown to be emergent from existing principles of OCM; the article pays special attention to compounding-style ME, which is argued to draw upon the same basic construction type utilized by Inkelas and Zoll (Reduplication: doubling in morphology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005) in a construction grammar approach to reduplication.

Ja'a Kumiai

Kumiai (Kumeyaay, formerly known as Diegueno; ISO code: DIH) is an endangered Yuman language of the Delta-California subgroup spoken across the Mexico–US border by approximately 150 people (Golla 2011 ). There are two major sets of Kumiai varieties: Northern Kumiai (Ipai/’Iipay) and Southern Kumiai (Tipai/Tiipay) (Golla 2011 ). A third cluster of varieties, located in southeastern San Diego County, is proposed in Langdon ( 1991 ) and Miller ( 2001 ). The speech illustrated below is representative of Ja’a, a Southern Kumiai dialect spoken in Juntas de Neji, Baja California, Mexico (see Figure 1 below). There are currently only four fluent speakers of Ja’a Kumiai (Miller 2016b ). Recordings were made over a six-month period with a 48-year-old female speaker born and raised in Juntas de Neji. Quantitative data reported in this paper are taken from a subset of the current corpus, from recordings made with the speaker in a soundproof booth. Only the speech of this single speaker is reported here given the severe endangerment of the language.