Reconstructing the Stress System of an Extinct Language: The Case of Chimariko

1. Reconstructing the Stress System of an Extinct Language:The Case of Chimariko Carmen Jany Cal State, San Bernardino cjany@csusb.edu

2. Introduction • Contents • Chimariko • Data • Stress Systems • Stress in Chimariko • Areal Perspective • Conclusions

3. Chimariko A few small villages along the Trinity River and New River in Northern California Source: Shirley, Silver, ‘Shastan Peoples’. Handbook of North American Indians

4. Chimariko • Small tribe (250 people in 1850s) • Gold mining in the area • Last spoken in the 1930s • Genetic affiliation • Language isolate (no closely related languages) • Distant genetic relationship: Hokan • Problems with Hokan hypotheses

5. Data

6. Data • Main sources • (1) 3500 pages of handwritten notes collected by J. P. Harrington in the 1920s from the last speakers • Available on microfilm • Narratives with translations, sentences, vocabulary • Stress sporadically marked • (2) Sound recording (1930s - date unclear; wax cylinder; words)

7. Data • J. P. Harrington

8. Data • Sound recording • Speaker: Martha Ziegler • Length: 13 minutes • Content: Elicitation of words; some repetitions • Media: from wax cylinder to cassette tape; digitized from cassette tape • Finding out how stress is reflected phonetically

9. Stress Systems • What is Stress? • Stress is a property of syllables • Increased prominence (= higher pitch, increased duration, increased intensity) associated with certain syllables • Strongest stress = primary stress • Weaker stress = secondary stress • In general, every word has one main stress

10. Stress Systems • Types of stress systems • Phonemic stress: Words have different meaning depending on stressGerman: unterstéllen ‘to insinuate’ únterstellen ‘to store’ • Phonologically predictable stress: Stress is predictable based on phonological properties • Fixed stress: always on same syllable • Weight-sensitive stress: ‘heavy’ syllables attract stress

11. Stress in Chimariko • Phonologically predictable stress(i.e. stress determined by shape of word) • Stress falls on the root or on the penultimate syllable of the root • Examples (roots underlined) • ápu ‘fire’ • éšoh ‘cold’ • šinčéla‘dog’ • mutákweh ‘rain’ • pʰuncári-ˀi ‘my wife’ • y-ečúda-n ‘I am lying down’

12. Stress in Chimariko • Stress on the final syllable of polysyllabic roots as a result of lexicalisation • Example (root underlined) • pʰuncá-lla ‘little girl’ • Vowel length not phonemic, but long vowels found sporadically in the data • If a word contains a long vowel, it is stressed • Examples (roots underlined) • pááčʰi-kun ‘no more’ • wissééda‘downstream’ • xu-kéé-na-tinda ‘you don’t understand’

13. Stress in Chimariko • How is stress reflected phonetically? • Based on other languages • Length (vowel longer) • Intensity (vowel louder) • Pitch (higher fundamental frequency) • Measurements for the vowel /a/ • áqʰa ‘water’ • ˀáˀah ‘deer’ • áqʰaqut ‘river’

14. Stress in Chimariko • Results • Length: Does not correlate with stress • But: Final unstressed vowel sometimes longer than stressed vowel (=> final lengthening is a common phenomenon cross-linguistically) • Intensity: No clear pattern, hence no correlation • Pitch: Higher pitch correlates with stress

15. Stress in Chimariko • High pitch in stressed vowel: ˀáˀah ‘deer’

16. Stress in Chimariko • Measurements for other vowels • /u, o, e/: final lengthening; pitch as only acoustic stress correlate • /i/: pitch not stress correlate, but creaky /i/ • Examples: • ápʰu ‘fire’ • húpohúpow ‘acorn soup’ • četnéuh ‘bread’

17. Stress in Chimariko • Summary • Phonologically predictable stress on the root or the penultimate syllable of the root • Exceptions due to lexicalisation • Syllables with long vowels marked as stressed in the data, but vowel length not a phonetic correlate of stress • Phonetic correlate of stress: Higher pitch

18. Areal Perspective • Northern California Linguistic Area • Extremely diverse speech area • Many languages spoken by small communities • Extensive language contact • Multilingualism, trade, and intermarriage • Many languages show similarities to unrelated neighbors (esp. phonological features) • Close neighbors: Wintu, Hupa, and Shasta

19. Areal Perspective • Stress in neighboring languages: Wintu, Shasta, Hupa • Phonologically predictable stress based on syllable weight in all three languages • CVV heaviest syllable in all three languages • Wintu/Shasta: If no long vowels, stress on penultimate syllable • Hupa: Root stress • Shasta/Hupa: Phonetic correlate is pitch

20. Areal Perspective • Similar to Chimariko • Penultimate stress (Wintu, Shasta) • Root stress (Hupa) • Phonetic correlate pitch (Hupa, Shasta) • Different from Chimariko • No evidence for phonemic vowel length (phonemic in Hupa, Shasta, Wintu) • No evidence for syllable weight

21. Areal Perspective • Was vowel length in Chimariko developing as a contact phenomenon? • Are vowels in stressed syllables in Chimariko lengthened in accord with CVV heavy syllables in Wintu, Shasta, and Hupa? • No! • The acoustic analysis contradicts this hypothesis • Vowel duration is not a correlate of stress

22. Conclusions • Reconstruction of the Chimariko Stress System • By examining old handwritten documents • By analyzing a sound recording for phonetic correlates of stress • By considering possible language contact phenomena • Stress system shows many similarities to the systems in its unrelated neighbors • Possible result of close and extended language contact

23. Conclusions • Overall purpose of this work • Fill a gap in the studies of California languages • Use grammars from neighboring languages and typology to piece together the stress system • Advance areal (language contact) and genetic (Hokan) studies of Northern California and beyond

24. Conclusions • Limitations to this work • Closed corpus (data is limited) • Some topics have to be treated in less detail due to the limited data • Data collected from multilingual speakers with limited fluency in Chimariko at a time when Chimariko was no longer actively spoken in a community

25. Thank you! Carmen Jany cjany@csusb.edu

26. Bibliography Berman, Howard. 2001. Chimariko Linguistic Material. Victor Golla and Sean O’Neill eds. The Collected Works of Edward Sapir XIV: Northwest California Linguistics. William Bright ed. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1039-1076. Dixon, Roland B. 1910. The Chimariko Indians and Language. University of California Publications in American Archeology and Ethnology 5:5. Berkeley: University of California Press. 295-380. Golla, Victor. 1970. Hupa Grammar. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Gordon, Matthew and Edmundo Luna. 2004. An intergenerational investigation of Hupa stress, Berkeley Linguistics Society 30.

27. Bibliography Harrington, John Peabody. 1921, 1926, 1928. Field notes on microfilm. Haas, Mary. 1976. The Northern California Linguistic Area. In Margaret Langdon and Shirley Silver eds. Hokan Studies: Papers from the First Conference on Hokan Languages. The Hague: Mouton. 347-360. Jany, Carmen. 2007. Chimariko in Areal and Typological Perspective. Ph.D Dissertation. University of California, Santa Barbara. Mithun, Marianne. 1994. Hokan Languages. In R.E. Asher ed. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon. 1588-1590.

28. Selected Bibliography Pitkin, Harvey. 1984. Wintu Grammar. University of California Publications in Linguistics Vol. 94. University of California Press: Berkeley. Powers, Stephen. 1877. Tribes of California. CNAE 3. 439-613. Washington, D.C. Silver, Shirley. 1966. The Shasta Language. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.