Patterns of (De)glottalization in Nivacle

Abstract

Nivacle is the only Mataguayan language where glottalization in vowels has been reported as a contrastive feature. Specifically, Stell (1989:97) postulates a phonemic distinction between plain vowels and glottalized vowels. As well, she treats the glottal stop as an independent consonantal phoneme in the language. Contra Stell (1989), it is proposed that there is no phonological opposition between modal vowels vs glottalized vowels; Nivacle glottalized vowels are sequences of a vowel plus a moraic glottal stop with different prosodic parsings. The glottal stop and its associated mora can either attach to the Nucleus of the syllable or to the syllable, in coda position. As a result, two different surface realizations result (i) rearticulated/creaky vowels,and (ii) vowel-glottal coda. Unifying these several properties, it is claimed that Nivacle glottalized vowels are underlyingly bimoraic and are licensed by the head of an iambic foot; the Nivacle language has a quantity-sensitive stress system. The proposed analysis offers a principled explanation of two prosodic properties related to the distribution and characteristics of Nivacle glottalized vowels. First, duration is a statistically significant acoustic property that differentiates modal from creaky/rearticulated vowels in Nivacle; the non-modal vowels are (almost) twice as long as their modal counterparts. Second, glottalized vowels consistently deglottalize, that is, they lose their [c.g.] feature (and thus shorten) in unstressed/non-head position.