This seminar takes place on a Wednesday

The location of this seminar has changed to: University Library - Doelenzaal

Abstract:

The present talk reports on phonological-phonetic research engagements with several Amazonian communities from 1978-2012. The sound systems of Amazonian communities have enriched phonological and phonetic theories in several ways: (i) they have phonological segments found nowhere else in the world; (ii) they manifest prosodic patterns found nowhere else; (iii) they display otherwise undocumented relationships between phonetic features and socio-cultural/phonological variations (e.g. the Pirahã "sloppy phoneme effect" (Everett 1985)). In this talk I review some of the more interesting phonological discoveries from Amazonian languages, focusing on my own field research on Pirahã, Banawá, Wari', Oro Win, Paumari, and Suyá/Kĩseǰi. I begin with a discussion of the implications for phonological theory of rare segments and segmental processes in Pirahã, Oro Win, and Wari'. Next we look at feet, stress, and tone in Pirahã. We finally examine syllable structures in these languages, focusing on Pirahã and the fact that it relies upon vowels apparently more than any other language in the world (C. Everett 2024). I conclude by remarking that a full description of the phenomena discussed here falls in some cases outside the scope of current theories (i.e. those theories are incomplete, though there may be no way to make them complete in this sense). I also offer some methodological remarks on field analysis and synthesis conceived of as processes of Peircean inference (abduction, induction, deduction).