An acoustic study of stem prominence in Hän Athabascan

Abstract

Observations in many studies of Athabascan languages have indicated that the stem syllable displays phonetic prominence, perhaps due to its semantic or structural importance, which is realized through a variety of acoustic means. Features such as voicing, duration, manner of articulation, voice quality, and vowel quality pattern differently in stems and prefixes, both in the diachronic developments of Athabascan phonology as well as in the synchronic, phonetic realizations of individual phonemes. This acoustic study of the Hän language investigates the synchronic realization of this morphological conditioning in fricatives, stops, and vowels, and attempts to unify several different phonological effects into a single theory of stem prominence. The results show that the most regular and predictable of these correlates of stem prominence is the increase in duration of segments in stem onsets (consonants) and nuclei (vowels). Additional variations in features that pattern according to morphological category, such as voicing (in fricatives), voice quality (in ejectives), and vowel quality are considered secondary effects largely influenced by duration.