Central Pame studies: Gibson 1956, Gibson and Bartholomew 1979

2.3 Central Pame studies: Gibson 1956, Gibson and Bartholomew 1979

Gibson’s 1956 article on Central Pame phonemics and morphophonemics is an extrememly detailed work and remains the most comprehensive phonemic statement on any Pame language. In the introductory paragraph, she states, Special attention of the reader is called to the unusual vowel system, the heavy consonant clusters, the great variety of syllable patterns, the combination of tone and stress and the wealth of morphophonemic changes Gibson 1956: 242. Regarding vowels, Gibson claims that Central Pame has just one back vowel, o. Her data findings reveal that no contrasts between the high back vowel u and o can be found and in fact, these tend to vary allophonically Gibson 1956: 242. She later notes that o is subject to deletion between certain vowels and a coda p. Likewise, she maintains that the vowel, which other Pameanists call a low-back vowel is better understood as a front-low vowel, which varies allophonically with its back counterpart. In describing the tone system, Gibson makes reference to syllable duration Gibson 1956: 244. Specifically, short syllables i.e. “fast” have a high tone-stress, while long syllables i.e. “slow” have a low or falling tone-stress. Likewise, Gibson finds tone to be contrastive only on stressed syllables, which is predictably the lexical root. Gibson draws attention to an interesting observation that “before a homorganic nasal in final clusters b d g have allophones which are articulated very slightly and rapidly” Gibson 1956: 245. The data she gives is the following. 3 Voiced stops before a homorganic nasal S TEM S UFFIX D ERIVED F ORM rothwã̀n -bmʔ rothwã̀mʔ ‘our.Ex.corn’ rothwã̀n -dn rothwã̀n ‘our.In.corn’ ta’wá -bmʔ ta’wábmʔ ‘our.Ex.hearts’ ta’wá -dn ta’wádn ‘our.In.hearts’ This topic has been taken up in Berthiaume 2000 where it is suggested that such a pattern is one of partial denasalization or ‘delayed velum lowering’ of a nasal consonant following an oral vowel. Under this proposal, these are not voiced stops at all but simply prestopped nasal consonants. 8 The gnawing problem of noun possession in Central Pame morphology is taken up in Gibson and Bartholomew 1979. The authors make a number of important observations about the co-occurrence restrictions of possessive morphology in Central Pame, which are described below. Gibson and Bartholomew describe Central Pame nouns as inflected for number of the possessed noun, number of the possessor and person of the possessor Gibson and Bartholomew 1979: 309. These categories are morphologically marked in a number of ways, which include prefixation, consonantal alternation of the lexical root, tone and suffixation. The choice between prefixation and suffixation is largely based on the semantic category of animacy. Inanimate nouns use prefixes and animate nouns use suffixes as in the respective examples ngo-dɛ̀ocʔ ‘bridge’ and manɛ̀p ‘my chin’. In addition, the authors mention that possessive tone morphology is productive on noun stems that are not marked with inflectional suffixes Gibson and Bartholomew 1979: 309. Regarding possessive tone, Gibson and Bartholomew observe that in these cases, the second person tone tends to be different from the first or third person Gibson and Bartholomew 1979: 312. Thus, they suggest three patterns to predict possession morphology, 1 ABC, 2 EFE, and 3 XXX. In the ABC pattern, the second person can be the same or different from the first and third. In the EFE pattern, the 8 The principal arguments for a denasalization process is that Pame never allows voiced obstruents in coda position. If Gibson’s approach is taken, there is a difficult exception to this generalization about the syllable structure of Pame. In addition, these “stops” are never orally released, but rather the air stream is rapidly redirected via a lowering of the velum. second person is always different. In the XXX pattern, tone has no change in any possessive form Gibson and Bartholomew 1979: 312-313. Although this article provides helpful insights regarding the general tendencies of Pame noun possession, these same insights tend to get obscured by the morass of phonetic detail in the data. Thus, Gibson and Bartholomew provide us with the morphological framework, but the subsequent morphophonemic processes are still left largely unexplained.

2.4 Northern Pame studies: Avelino 1997, 2002