Calendar

• Yana AQUILINA

dans le cadre COVALI

talk given at Lund university résumé à venir

• Emiliana Cruz Cruz (CIESAS-Mexico City)
• Anthony C. Woodbury [presenter] (University of Texas at Austin)

dans le cadre DILIS

Zoom link: TBA

‘Crazy rules’ (Bach & Harms 1972) are phonological alternations or patterns lacking in coherent synchronic phonetic motivation. They typically arise when more ‘natural’ rules change over time e.g., by broadening their phonetic scope, merging with other similar rules, or losing their original phonetic context (Blevins 2004:84-5); and they challenge the assumption that phonetic ‘naturalness’ is a necessary condition in the constitution or learning of phonological systems (Moreton & Pater 2012). Rather, they offer a lens through which to consider the extent to which phonological systems may or may not vary (e.g., Kiparsky 2014), as well as the nature, the genesis, and even the persistence over time of patterns that are atypical or unusual (Woodbury 2024).
Documentation and diachronic explanation for ‘crazy rules’ has typically focused on morphophonological alternations involving segments. Here we present a ‘crazy rule’ involving utterance-level tone spreading in the Chatino language family (Otomanguean; Oaxaca, Mexico; Campbell 2013), facilitated by our reconstruction of lexical, grammatical, and phrasal tone in this family well known for its elaboration of tone. We show how a conservative process of utterance-level high tone spreading (attested across the family and preserved in San Marcos Zacatepec Eastern Chatino, Villard 2015, which we describe) has innovated in San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino (Cruz 2011) into a ‘crazy rule’ where the class of five high- or superhigh-ending tonal cognate sets that originally triggered the high spreading in conservative varieties underwent tonal changes that left an ‘unnatural’ array of level, rising and falling tonemes as the trigger (and that likewise left the class of non-triggering, originally non-high, tonal cognate sets comparably heterodox). Further, the original unbounded high-tone spread itself turned into the iterative copying and linking of a falling (mid-to-low) toneme to each word up to the end of the utterance, interesting because it transforms the continuation of phonetic high pitch into the stepwise phonological propagation of a particular tonemic figure.
Finally and more speculatively, the process is of interest in its wider sociolinguistic context of apparently rapid village-by-village differentiation: San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino is one of about 10 highly distinct village-level Eastern Chatino varieties where originally multimoraic and multisyllabic wordforms became monosyllabic via non-final vowel loss, preserving the tone-based lexical and grammatical classes originally carried in tonal melodies (sequences of tonemes) by elaborating their toneme inventories in various ways (Woodbury 2019); but San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino is unique in having fashioned distinctiveness by preserving and transforming this (and several other) sandhi patterns from the protolanguage.

Bach, Emmon & Robert T. Harms. 1972. How do languages get crazy rules? Linguistic change and generative theory, edited by Robert Stockwell & Ronald Macaulay, 1-21. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Blevins, Juliette. 2004. Evolutionary phonology: The emergence of sound patterns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Campbell, Eric W. 2013. The internal diversification and subgrouping of Chatino (Otomanguean). International Journal of American Linguistics , 79 (3), 395-420.
Cruz, Emiliana. 2011. Phonology, tone, and the functions of tone in San Juan Quiahije Chatino. Doctoral dissertation. University of Texas at Austin.
Kiparsky, Paul. 2014. New perspectives in historical linguistics. In Bowern, Claire, & Evans, Bethwyn, Handbook of Historical Linguistics.
Moreton, Elliott, & Joe Pater. 2012. Structure and substance in artificial-phonology learning, part II: Substance. Language and Linguistics Compass 6/11:702-718.
Villard, Stéphanie. 2015. The phonology and morphology of Zacatepec Chatino. Doctoral dissertation. University of Texas at Austin.
Woodbury, Anthony C. 2019. Conjugational double-classification: The separate life cycles of prefix classes vs. tone ablaut classes in aspect/mood inflection in the Chatino languages of Oaxaca, Mexico. In Matthew Baerman, Timothy Feist & Enrique Palancar (eds.), Amerindia 41, Inflection class complexity in the Otomanguean languages of Mexico. Woodbury, Anthony C. 2024. Seeing linguistic systems as intellectual, aesthetic, and expressive achievements. Language 100 (4), 732-775.

Présentation de Christine Dunoyer, Centre d'Etudes francoprovençales "René Willien", Vallée d'Aoste, Italie

• Tim Mukhin (Université de Liège)

séminaire DiLiS

Biography:

Tim Mukhin is a PhD student at the University of Liège (Liège, Belgium), where, as a member of the collaborative SPACEGRAM project (https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/311105/1/SPACEGRAM_AVL_Berlin_20231205.pdf), he investigates how elements with spatial meaning develop into applicative markers from a typological perspective. For his BA and MA in Theoretical and Computational Linguistics at HSE University (Moscow, Russia) he worked on East Caucasian languages.