Séminaire DTT - Conférence Natalia Aralova
Issues in the study of Negidal vowels
14h-16h
ISH - Salle André Frossard
In this talk I will describe the system of Negidal vowels and will show which problems I am encountering trying to establish its vowel inventory. I will present the first results of my acoustic study of Negidal vowels with a focus on the area of /o - ə - ɑː - a /, which show the most variation in my data. For example, the distributions of /ə/ and /o/ do not show a clear separation, reflecting extensive intra- and inter-speaker variation: the same lexeme with an /ə/ shows stronger labialization in certain instances than in the others both within and across speakers. This leads to difficulties with postulating the underlying vowels in some roots. Interestingly, a high degree of variation can also be found in the description of Cincius, who collected her data at the end of the 1920s, almost a hundred years ago.