A Grammar of Lushootseed: Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology

Abstract

In this dissertation, I document the phonetics, phonology, and morphology of Lushootseed from a corpus of recordings recovered from the archives of the University of Washington’s Burke Museum. There are several goals to this dissertation. One goal is to fill in an important gap in the literature on Lushootseed (and Coast Salish) phonetics, where the phonetics of Lushootseed is critically under documented. The goal is to characterize the pattern of speech sounds in Lushootseed by conducting instrumental acoustic analysis of speech sounds from these recordings. Another goal is to address questions concerning the morphology of Lushootseed that has not been previously investigated. Some of these questions concerns the morphological typology of Lushootseed, the position class of verbal affixes, allomorphs, the role of independent pronouns, as well as a descriptive overview of Lushootseed determiners. I cover several topics on the phonetics and phonology of Lushootseed. For one topic, I compare vowel qualities between the two dialects of Lushootseed, where I test the claim that there are dialectal differences in the realization of /i/ and /u/ (Hess & Hilbert 1976; Zahir 2019) by conducting an acoustic analysis of vowels across Lushootseed dialects. I found that the vowels are acoustically similar between the two dialects. Another topic that I cover is Lushootseed obstruents, where I conduct the first acoustic analysis of obstruents in Lushootseed. A third topic that I address in this dissertation is denasalization, which resulted in a voiced stop series. Although Lushootseed denasalization has been previously documented, an acoustic phonetic analysis of residual nasality in voiced stops has not been conducted. In this dissertation, I conduct the first acoustic phonetic analysis of voiced stops in such a way that can inform us about denasalization in Lushootseed. Another topic that I cover is the prosodic structure of Lushootseed, where I develop the first system of transcribing intonation in Lushootseed. Other topics include the coarticulatory effect of uvular consonants on vowel quality, the analysis and classification of ejectives, as well as an acoustic analysis of laryngealized sonorants in Lushootseed. In this dissertation, I also cover several topics on Lushootseed morphology. For one topic, I classify the morphological typology of Lushootseed using a quantitative approach. Moreover, I provide the first phonological analysis of the [ɡʷ]~[kʷ] alternation in Lushootseed, where I analyzed this allomorph as coda devoicing. Another topic that I cover is pronominal morphology, where I analyze each pronominal morpheme and how they function syntactically. A third topic that I cover is the set of Tense-Aspect-Mood (TAM) prefixes, where I provide the first analysis of the position class of TAM prefixes. I analyze the position class of TAM prefixes as being due to their unique phonological shapes. A fourth topic that I cover is the set of valency-changing operators, where I analyze not only each valency-changing operator one-by-one, but also the combinations of valency-changing operators in Lushootseed. Finally, I cover determiners and nominal morphology in Lushootseed.