Karee Garvin and Hannah Sande (PhD 2017) have launched a new cross institution discussion group. The group focuses on phonology, welcoming presentations on any and all phonology and phonology adjacent topics. The group meets weekly on Tuesdays at 12:00 PDT. All are welcome to attend. To be added to the mailing list and to receive the Zoom link, email Karee.
Here are the details for the meeting on May 12:
Jack Merrill (Princeton; PhD 2018) and Nik Rolle (Princeton; PhD 2018): Tone triggers vowel-epenthesis and vowel-retention in Wamey (Konyagi).
In this talk we present a case of tone-conditioned ǝ-epenthesis in the Wamey language (Niger-Congo: Guinea, Senegal), based on data from Santos (1996). While vowel epenthesis to host an intonational floating tone is attested in a number of languages (Roettger 2017), it has been claimed that vowel epenthesis to host a lexical/morphological floating tone is unattested~impossible (de Lacy 2003, Blumenfeld 2006, Gleim 2019). Wamey presents the clearest case yet of exactly this phenomenon. One piece of evidence comes from the shape of roots. For CVC roots, there are three surface tone patterns - H, L, and HL (falling) - while CVCǝ roots have only one surface tonal pattern - CV̀Cǝ́ (LH). We argue that these are all derived from CVC roots with four contrastive tonal patterns, and that in order to avoid a rising tone, ǝ is inserted to host the H of the underlying LH pattern. Similar generalizations can be made for disyllabic roots. A second piece of evidence comes from ə-alternating suffixes which alternate between [-C] vs. [-Cə́] forms. We show that these affixes pattern as C-final morphs, and therefore [ə] forms demonstrate epenthesis. Finally, while there is a separate process of ǝ-epenthesis to break up CC clusters, we show that this is a separate phenomenon, and that tone-driven ǝ-epenthesis is not dependent on segmental context.