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Phonological, grammatical, and written words in Wichi

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Abstract

This article aims at investigating the linguistic criteria to determine what a word is in Wichi (Matacoan), a polysynthetic and agglutinative language spoken in the Gran Chaco Region, in South America. The main phonological criteria proposed are phonological rules and stress. We also apply some grammatical criteria that have been proposed cross linguistically, some of which are useful to determine the boundaries of grammatical words in Wichi. Finally, we explore the relationship between the phonological and grammatical word with the written word. We base our analysis of written words on a textbook (Tsalanawu) used in many bilingual schools in Northeastern Argentina.

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Notes

  1. http://www.indec.gov.ar/webcenso/ECPI/index_ecpi.asp.

  2. The 2006 version is an adaptation of the 1996 into a different Wichi dialect. It also contains innovative pedagogical material. The 2006 version was published as part of the Documentation Program of Endangered languages (DOBES) sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation and directed by Lucía Golluscio.

  3. We decide to provide examples from these two dialects because they do not exhibit many dialectal differences. Their phonological inventories are quite similar except for the following segments: the palatalized phoneme /kj/ and the uvular /q/ from the dialect spoken in Rivadavia are realized as an affricate /tʃ/ and a velar /k/ in Ingeniero Juarez. Thus ‘mountain’ and ‘head’ in Rivadavia are ta k j enax and ɬete q while in Ingeniero Juárez, ta t ʃenax and ɬete k. There is also a morphological difference that the reader will notice in this article: in the dialect spoken in Rivadavia the 1st person possessive marker is a nasal, n- or nj-, while in Ingeniero Juárez it is a nasalized vowel: ũ- or ũj.

  4. In monovalent clauses the verb can precede or follow the noun with no change in meaning, only a different emphasis on the first element of the clause:

    1. (i)
      figure a

  5. In this paper we will refer either to murmuration or devoicing. In the literature on Wichi (Avram 2008; Terraza 2009; Nercesian 2011a, 2011b) the process triggered by /h/ on nasals is analyzed as “devoicing”. In Rivadavia dialect nasals are devoiced by /h/ (Terraza 2009) but in Ingeniero Juárez and Tartagal dialects we registered that /h/ triggers murmur phonation rather than devoicing. Spectrograms show that in murmured sounds there is a weakening of acoustic energy but voicing is maintained in nasals (for more details see Cayré Baito 2013).

  6. See Terraza (2009: 26–27; 40–41) for arguments against the analysis of aspirated and devoiced nasals as a sequence of two segments.

  7. In Terraza (2009)-hi is analyzed as an inalienable noun used in nominal compounding processes; while in Cayré Baito (2013)-hi is analyzed as a nominalizer suffix. For the purpose of this paper we follow Terraza, see Sect. 3.1.3.

  8. The gloss neg3 stands for a negative morpheme which subsumes negation and person, in this case 3rd person. There are two ways of negating a clause in Wichi, with the suffix -hit’e or with a set of morphemes (a prefix and a suffix) subsuming person and negation: nam-a (1st), qa-a (2nd person), ni-a (3rd person). The second part of this negative morpheme, -a, has been analysed as the irrealis in Chorote (Carol 2014). In previous work (Terraza 2009) we analyzed this two affixes as a discontinuous morpheme.

  9. It is worth mentioning that stress in Wichí requires a thorough study, since it does not always appear to be regular. We have noticed that some suffixes present a double behavior depending on the bases or stems with which they co-occur. In some cases they follow the general stress pattern (they attract stress) but in others they do not (Terraza 2009; Cayré Baito 2013):

    1. (i)
      figure p
    1. (ii)
      figure q

  10. According to Terraza (2009) verbal derivation in Wichi is possible with two verbal roots semantically similar: wu and jen that have the meaning ‘to do’. Both roots require the verbalizer morpheme -a that is suffixed at the end of the derived verb. The same construction is analyzed as an instance of noun incorporation (see Nercesian, this volume). For more details and for the arguments against a noun incorporation analysis see Terraza (2009: 173–183).

  11. This term is not used by Dixon and Aikhenvald (2002).

  12. Here the diminutive suffix -xwax is reduced to -a. The derivation of the plural form of sinox ‘dog’ is as follows: /sinox-os/ (vowel copying and insertion), then the velar /x/ becomes /h/ in onset position yielding /sinohos/. The first vowel drops as a consequence of a syncope yielding /sinhos/ and finally /h/ devoices the nasal /n/ yielding [sin̥os].

  13. The morpheme ha- is glossed here as an exclamatory marker. However, in its more common use it functions as an interrogative marker.

  14. This is one of the words used for written word. It is formed on the verb root tson which means ‘drive, inject, poke’.

  15. In the dialect of the first version the verb is -hemen (to like), and in the dialect used in the second version the same verb is -hemin.

Abbreviations

1:

= first person

2:

= second person

3:

= third person

adv :

= adverb

augm :

= augmentative

appl :

= applicative

caus :

= causative

cl :

= classifier

coll :

= collective

dem :

= demonstrative

dim :

= diminutive

dir :

= directional

distr :

= distributive

excl :

= exclamatory marker

foc :

= focus marker

freq :

= frequentative

fut :

= future

incl :

= inclusive

int :

= interrogative

iter :

= iterative

imp :

= imperfective

loc :

= locative

neg :

= negation

nmlz :

= nominalizer

obj :

= object

pat :

= patientive

pl :

= plural

poss :

= possessive

pro :

= pronoun

profint:

= interrogative preform

refl :

= reflexive marker

sg :

= singular

sub :

= subordinator

tns :

= tense

vblz :

= verbalizer

( ):

= deleted segments

+:

= morpheme boundary

σ :

= syllabic edge

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Département de linguistique, Université du Québec à Montréal, 320, rue Sainte Catherine est, H2X 1L7, Montreal, Canada

    Jimena Terraza

  2. Instituto de Investigaciones Geohistóricas (CONICET-UNNE), Núcleo de Estudios en Lenguas Minoritarias Americanas (NELMA), CONICET: Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tenológicas (National Council of Research, Science and Technology), Universidad Nacional del Nordeste, Av. Castelli 930, 3500, Resistencia-Chaco, Argentina

    Lorena Cayré Baito

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  1. Jimena Terraza
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Correspondence to Jimena Terraza.

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Terraza, J., Cayré Baito, L. Phonological, grammatical, and written words in Wichi. Morphology 24, 199–221 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-014-9240-1

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