Challenging Sonority - Cross-linguistic Evidence - Martin J. Ball

Challenging Sonority - Cross-linguistic Evidence - Martin J. Ball

Exceptions to the SSP: Evidence from Ottawa for a Metatheoretical Approach

Challenging Sonority - Cross-linguistic Evidence - Martin J. Ball

Marie Klopfenstein [+-]
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Marie Klopfenstein, Ph.D. in an Associate Professor in the Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology program, which is part of the Department of Applied Health at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She teaches undergraduate and graduate classes in phonetics, speech science, and voice. Dr. Klopfenstein has presented and published widely on acoustic and perceptual correlates of speech naturalness. Her other research includes voice services for transgender and gender non-conforming individuals, speech rate, sonority, and phonetic transcription, with current focus on populations with unmet needs and issues with accessing speech and language services.

Description

Ottawa is an Algonquian language spoken by an estimated 8,000 people from southern Ontario to northern Michigan. It is one of several dialects of Ojibwe, including Severn Ojibwe, Algonquin and Northwestern Ojibwe. This chapter concerns the Ottawa dialect specifically. It is known by other names, including Odawa or Nishbaabemwin by its speakers, which means ‘Indian language.’ Ottawa’s phonology includes seventeen consonants, seven oral vowels, and four long nasal vowels. It also features vowel syncope and when combined with Ottawa’s system of inflectional morphology using prefixes and suffixes, allows for a variety of consonant clusters both syllable-initially and finally. In Ottawa, metrically weak vowels tend to be deleted. Standard feet consist of two syllables, one weak and one strong, respectively. The Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) proposes that the syllable nucleus is the peak of sonority within the syllable, with progressively decreasing sonority values in the onset and coda, if present. Because of Ottawa’s vowel syncope and inflectional morphology, there are many examples of syllables that violate the latter aspect of the SSP. While it is well-known that languages like English and Russian also violate the SSP in some of their possible syllable structures, this chapter will examine Ottawa, a less commonly studied language, for any support it can lend to the various approaches that have been proposed to account for exceptions to the SSP.

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Citation

Klopfenstein, Marie. Exceptions to the SSP: Evidence from Ottawa for a Metatheoretical Approach. Challenging Sonority - Cross-linguistic Evidence. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 144-158 Oct 2016. ISBN 9781781792278. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=25676. Date accessed: 28 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.25676. Oct 2016

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