Language Description and Documentation Commons^™

Final Vowel Devoicing In Blackfoot, Samantha Leigh Prins

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis presents a study of final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot, an indigenous language of Montana and Alberta. Previous research on final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot variously suggests word-final, phrase-final, and utterance-final vowel devoicing processes (e.g. Taylor 1965, Bliss & Gick 2009, Frantz 2017), though, the conditioning environment for this phenomenon had not been a research focus prior to this study. The present study investigates intonation units (IUs) as the conditioning domain for final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot.

Final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot is investigated here by examining the common word-final suffixes –wa (3SG.AN) and –yi (4SG) in two recordings …

The Appendix, Bert Vaux, Andrew Wolfe

Bert Vaux

We bring together a wide range of linguistic evidence and arguments that have been adduced in support of extrasyllabicity, and synthesize a representational theory that accounts for the subset of these that should be accounted for. We will see that some of the more famous phenomena cited as evidence for the appendix are not actually probative, but on the basis of ample other evidence we will suggest that phonological segments can attach to prosodic nodes higher than the syllable, and that the specific locus of attachment can vary both between and within languages.