2020.09.12 13:05
Ngaihte, Chiin Ngaihmuan, Jeffrey J. Holliday and Kelly H. Berkson. 2020. A phonetic investigation of some temporal properties of Paite obstruents. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 26.2. 341-363.
Voice Onset Time has been
successfully used to capture stop contrasts in a variety of languages, but much
of the existing work has focused on 2-category languages, meaning those with
2-way laryngeal contrasts. Data for 3-category languages remainsomewhat
limited. Almost completely unrepresented in the existing literature is the
Kuki-Chin sub-branch of theTibeto-Burman language family. Kuki-Chin languages
generally contain three stoptypes, contrasting voiced, voiceless, and aspirated
stops (e.g. /d/ vs. /t/ vs. /th/). This study presents an instrumental analysis
of data from 12 speakers of Paite, an under-documented Kuki-Chin language from
Northern India. We report the distribution of VOT across the three stoptypes
and places of articulation, along with data that shed light on two unresolved
issues in previous phonological descriptions: (1) both stop and fricative
realizations have been reported for the sound generally referred to as the
aspirated velar stop; (2) similarly, phonetically variable realizations have
been reported for two affricate graphemes, <c> and <ch>. As
previous reports of variability have been largely impressionistic, the data
presented here help clarify the nature of the variation. In addition to
representingthe first-ever corpus of acoustic data in Paite, the current work
is also, to the best of our knowledge, the first substantive study of VOT in a
3-category Kuki-Chin language.
Keywords: Kuki-Chin, Paite,
3-category stop contrast