THE CONSONANTS OF GOSIUTE by Dirk Allen Elzinga Copyright

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THE CONSONANTS OF GOSIUTE
by
Dirk Allen Elzinga

Copyright © Dirk Allen Elzinga 1999
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the
DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
In the Graduate College
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
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THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA ®
GRADUATE COLLEGE
A s m e m b e r o f t h e F i n a l E x a m i n a t i o n C o m m i t t e e , w e c e r t i f y t h a t w e h a v e
r e a d t h e d i s s e r t a t i o n p r e p a r e d b y Dirk Allen Elzinga
e n t i t l e d THE CONSONANTS OF GOSIUTE

a n d r e c o m m e n d t h a t i t b e a c c e p t e d a s f u l f i l l i n g t h e d i s s e r a t i o n r e q u i r e m e n t
f o r t h e D e g r e e o f Doctor of Philosophy

Diana Archangeli Date

Richard Demers Date

Michael Hammond Date

John McLaughlin Date

Date
F i n a l a p p r o v a l a n d a c c e p t a n c e o f t h i s d i s s e r t a t i o n i s c o n t i n g e n t u p o n t h e
c a n d i d a t e ' s s u b m i s s i o n o f t h e f i n a l c o p y o f t h e d i s s e r a t i o n t o t h e G r a d u a t e
C o l l e g e .
I h e r e b y c e r t i f y t h a t I h a v e r e a d t h i s d i s s e r a t i o n p r e p a r e d u n d e r m y
d i r e c t i o n a n d r e c o m m e n d t h a t i t b e a c c e p t e d a s f u l f i l l i n g t h e d i s s e r t a t i o n
r e q u i r e m e n t .

Dissertation Director Date
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STATEMENT BY AUTHOR
This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfullment of requirements for an
advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to
be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.
Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission,
privided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for
extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be
granted by the copyright holder.
SIGNED:
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Acknowledgements
This is the place where I get to thank all of the people who have helped me in the course of
my graduate studies. First, I wish to thank my advisor Diana Archangeli for her unfailing
interest in this project and for her guidance in helping me see it to completion. Not only was
she interested in my work, but she was also a good friend to me and my family; thanks,
Diana. I also wish to thank the other members of my committee: Mike Hammond for good
conversations which, if not directly on topic, were always relevant; Dick Demers for advice
and assistance on phonetic matters and for his unfailing good humor; and John McLaughlin
for keeping me honest with the data. Each of them has contributed substantively to this
dissertation.
I want to thank Wick Miller for initiating me into the wonders of Uto-Aztecan
linguistics and Numic phonology, and for taking me on as a research assistant when I was a
student at the University of Utah. This experience more than anything else instilled in me a
great love and appreciation for the Gosiutes and their language. Wick is no longer with us,
but it is because of him that this dissertation was written.
I am grateful to Marianna Di Paolo at the University of Utah for generously
providing facilities for interviews with my Gosiute consultants and for making available to
me Wick Miller's tapes and notebooks from his own fieldwork on Gosiute and Western
Shoshoni.
I am deeply appreciative to my Gosiute language consultants Imogene Steele, Eva
Murphy, and Chester Steele for generously supplying examples, stories, and insights into
their language and culture. Working with them has always been rewarding and enjoyable,
and I look forward to many more happy hours with them.
I thank my fellow graduate students at the University of Arizona, in particular,
Keiichiro Suzuki, Amy Fountain and Sean Hendricks, for listening to more about Gosiute
phonology than anyone should ever have to. Their comments on earlier versions of this
material were spot-on and always appreciated. I'm also glad that linguistics wasn't the only
thing we could talk about; good friends are hard to find and I consider myself lucky to have
found them. I also acknowledge the assistance of Rosemary Emery in navigating the paper
maze of graduate school. She has saved me from more than one almost-missed deadline.
Finally, I want to thank my wife, Laura, and my son Michael for their patience and
love during the past few years. Graduate school is hard; I can't imagine having done it
without them.
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Dedication
This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of Wick Miller.
And to my wife and son for their love and patience.
"No theory can exclude everything that is wrong, poor, or even detestable, or
include everything that is right, good, or beautiful."
- Arnold Schoenberg
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Table of Contents
Abstract 8
Chapter 1: Introduction 9
1. Gosiute as a Numic Language 9
2. Consonant Alternations and Numic "Final Features" 11
3. Theoretical Assumptions 15
3.1. Optimality Theory 15
3.2. Grounding 17
3.2.1. Positional Grounding 19
3.2.2. French Mid Vowels 24
4. Overview of the Dissertation 26
5. Empirical and Theoretical Contributions 28
Chapter 2: Continuancy and Voicing 30
1. Introduction 30
2. Continuancy: the generalizations 35
2.1. Consonants and continuancy 38
2.2. Frication in Gosiute 38
2.3. Tapping 43
2.4. Stridents 49
2.5. Summary 53
3. The voicing of obstruents 54
3.1. On the naturalness of voiceless obstruents 56
3.2. Post-nasal obstruent voicing 58
3.3. Excursus on NC homorganicity 61
3.4. Voicing and fricatives 63
3.4.1. Intervocalic voicing 63
3.4.2. Voicing and [+spread glottis] 65
3.4.3. Is Voicing distinctive for Gosiute fricatives? 69
3.5. Summary 72
4. Conclusion 73
Chapter 3: Introduction to the Final Features: Gemination 75
1. Introduction 75
2. Final features 75
3. Gemination 83
3.1. Descriptive generalizations 83
3.2. The representation of Gemination 85
4. The analysis of Gemination 88
4.1. The expression of Gemination 88
4.2. The surface absence of Gemination 90
4.2.1. Phrase-final Gemination 90
4.2.2. Prevocalic Gemination 91
4.2.3. Precontinuant Geminate deletion 93
4.3. Summary 94
5. Conclusion 95
Chapter 4: Nasalization 96
1. Introduction 96
2. Description of Nasalization patterns 96
2.1. The realization of Nasalization 97
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Table of Contents—continued
3. Nasal Deletion 102
3.1. Phrase-final Nasal Deletion 103
3.2. Pre-vocalic Nasal Deletion 104
3.3. Pre-continuant Nasal Deletion 106
3.3.1. /ns/ clusters 108
3.3.2. /nh/ clusters 109
3.3.3. /nG/ clusters 110
3.4. Summary 111
4. Accusative Nasalization 111
4.1. Accusative Nasalization: the basic pattern 112
4.2. Accusative Nasalization and floating [nasal] 116
4.3. Summary 118
5. Conclusion 119
Chapter 5: Aspiration 121
1. Introduction 121
2. Description and Generalizations 125
3. The analysis of Aspiration 126
3.1. Aspiration and voiceless stops 126
3.2. Aspiration and nasals 131
4. Aspiration and Deletion 134
4.1. Phrase-final Aspiration Deletion 134
4.2. Prevocalic and Precontinuant Aspiration Deletion 136
4.3. Summary 137
5. Accusative Aspiration 137
5.1. Accusative Aspiration: the basic pattern 138
5.2. Accusative Aspiration and floating [+sg] 142
6. Conclusion 142
Chapter 6: Fronting and Palatalization 148
1. Introduction 148
2. Fronting and [+distributed] 151
2.1. Fronting data and generalizations 151
2.2. Analysis of Fronting 154
2.3. Summary of Fronting 158
3. Palatalization and [+strident] 159
3.1. Palatalization data and generalizations 159
3.2. Analysis of Palatalization 161
3.3. Summary of Palatalization 165
4. Chain Shifts and Local Conjunction in the Gosiute Constraint Set 165
5. Conclusion 170
Chapter 7: Concluding Remarks 172
1. Introduction 172
2. Grounding 172
3. Richness of the Base 175
4. The role of representations in OT 177
5. Why isn't this just phonetics? 178
6. Conclusion 179
References180
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Abstract
This dissertation is an analysis of the consonantal phonology of Gosiute, a member of the
Numic group of Uto-Aztecan languages. The Numic languages are characterized by
consonant alternations and distributional patterns which are rooted in patterns of phonetic
naturalness. In this dissertation I provide an analysis of these patterns of distribution and
alternation within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). This
dissertation accomplishes three things. First, it provides the most detailed treatment to date
of the consonant system of a Numic language. Second, it demonstrates the efficacy of
Grounding Theory (Archangeli and Pulleyblank 1994) in the analysis of the consonantal
patterns under investigation. Third, it shows that Optimality Theory is up to the task of
providing a framework for the analysis of large portions of the phonological system of a
single language.
Chapter 1: Introduction
1. Gosiute as a Numic Language
The Numic languages form one of the five immediate sub-families of the large Uto-Aztecan
language family (1) and comprise a far-flung group ranging from Death Valley and the
lower Colorado River valley in the south and west to central Wyoming and the Southern
Plains of Oklahoma and Texas in the north and east. Despite the wide area covered by
Numic languages, they form a linguistically tight-knit family.
(1) Uto-Aztecan Family Tree (Miller 1983, Miller 1984)
Uto-Aztecan
Southern
Numic Tübatulabal Takic Hopi Uto-Aztecan
Western Central Southern
Sonoran
Mono Tümpisa Kawaiisu
Aztecan
Shoshone
Northern Colorado
Paiute Shoshoni River
Numic
Comanche
The Numic family is divided into three branches: Western Numic, Central Numic,
and Southern Numic. There has been an attempt to group Central and Southern Numic
together into a branch coordinate with Western Numic (Freeze and Ianucci 1979), but the
interpretation of the evidence for this grouping is controversial. In this work, I will not enter
into a discussion of the internal classification of Numic and assume the traditional tripartite
division of Numic which is illustrated in (1).
2
Within each branch of Numic there is a basic division between a "core" and a
"periphery" language (Lamb 1958: the terms "core" and "periphery" are mine). The core
Western Numic language is Mono, the core Central Numic language is Tümpisa Shoshone
(Panamint), and the core Southern Numic language is Kawaiisu. The core languages occupy
a much more restricted area and display greater internal dialect diversity than do the
periphery languages. Furthermore, the dialects of the periphery languages that are closest to
the core show greater internal diversity than the dialects located farther away; dialect
boundaries become increasingly difficult to determine the farther one goes from the core.
The clearest boundary in the periphery languages is found in Central Numic between
Shoshoni and Comanche. This is due to a mounted migration of one or several bands of
Eastern Shoshoni speakers to the Southern Plains in the early 1700s, which effectively
removed them from contact with their former Shoshoni neighbors (Shimkin 1986).
The relative positions of the Numic languages are shown in (2). The language
names are given in a larger typeface, with important dialects noted in smaller type. I have
labelled the Southern Numic periphery language in (1) and (2) Colorado River Numic; I
use this term to avoid cumbersome circumlocutions like "Chemehuevi-Ute" (Kroeber 1907,
Lamb 1958) or to avoid applying to the whole branch misleading and potentially offensive
labels such as "Ute" (Lamb 1958, Miller 1983). Following Dayley (1989) I have also
labelled the Central Numic core language in (1) and (2) Tümpisa Shoshone rather than
Panamint.1

1The spelling "Timbisha" is the spelling used by speakers; Dayley (1989) spells this "Tümpisa."