Past Event

Prosodic Documentation of Endangered Languages: Case Studies from the American Southwest

 Dr. Colleen M. Fitzgerald
Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics and TESOL
(The University of Texas at Arlington)

In this talk, I present findings from two theoretically-driven prosodic investigations into languages of the American Southwest. These research projects analyze data from Tohono O’odham, a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Arizona, and data from the Oklahoma variety of Choctaw, a Muskogean language. I will show the importance of phonological, in particular, prosodic documentation of a language.

The prosody of a language includes key features of a language’s pronunciation: pitch, loudness, duration, and vowel quality. Prosodic phonology theorizes about the organization of those cues into higher-level groupings such as syllables, feet, words, and phrases. Prosodic documentation of a language has been claimed to be one of the most challenging areas for linguists when documenting an unfamiliar language. Himmelmann and Ladd (2008: 245) note that field training manuals often fail to adequately cover prosodic features, also commenting that “[b]ecause it works at different levels and because it has both universal and language- specific aspects, prosody is likely to seem mysterious and difficult.”

The case studies serve as arguments for deep and nuanced, theoretically-informed documentation of prosody, with native speaker intuitions serving as the foundation of this research. Both languages interweave prosodic and segmental features into a complex constellation of cues and groupings. Prosodic cues like pitch and duration do not necessarily map directly onto prosodic units such as feet in every language. Tohono O’odham demonstrates how prosody invokes duration differently in different parts of the phonological grammar, a finding both typologically novel (Fitzgerald, Forthcoming in 2012) and theoretically relevant (cf. moraic consistency as in Broselow 1995, Gordon 2006 and related work). In the case of Choctaw, the cue of pitch can work independently of the rhythmic patterning, given the role played by pitch in the morphological system (Fitzgerald, Under Review). Findings from this research thus have important theoretical, typological, and methodological implications for language documentation and phonological theory.

About the Presenter

Colleen M. Fitzgerald is Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics and TESOL at The University of Texas at Arlington. Her expertise lies in the areas of phonology, phonetics, and language documentation and revitalization. She has nearly two decades of experience working with Native American language communities, starting in 1993 with the Tohono O’odham of Arizona and extending to recent work with Oklahoma Native languages. Her work in Oklahoma includes collaborative projects with the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program, and the Choctaw Language Program, as well as the 2012 Oklahoma Breath of Life Workshop, with Dr. Mary Linn of the University of Oklahoma and funded by the National Science Foundation. Her research has been published in Phonology, Linguistic Inquiry and the International Journal of American Linguistics, among others.