We are very pleased to (virtually) welcome Marija Tabain, a Professor of Linguistics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. She is an esteemed phonetician and the current editor of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association. Her own research has encompassed a range of languages across four continents, including five indigenous languages of Australia. She will be giving a talk for our department - "The phonetics of Qaqet, a language of Papua New Guinea" - on Friday, December 4, at 3:00 PM via Zoom.
Qaqet is a Baining language of East New Britain province, Papua New Guinea. In this talk, I initially outline the phonetics and phonology of Qaqet, which has four vowels and 16 consonants, focusing in particular on phonetic variability in this small phoneme inventory. I then consider in a little more detail the voiced stops of Qaqet /b d ɡ/, which are described by Hellwig (2019) as being pre-nasalized. The issue of pre-nasalization of voiced stops has been of considerable interest in the literature on Papuan languages (cf. Palmer 2018), and their presence in Qaqet (a Papuan language) is usually attributed to contact with Oceanic languages. I present analyses of the voiced stops which suggest that any pre-nasalization is acoustically quite different from the nasal consonant phonemes of the language, and serves largely to maintain the very long voiced stop closure durations. These phonetic details may inform issues of language contact between Oceanic languages and Papuan languages, providing evidence of how a particular phonetic feature may be realized when borrowed into an existing inventory.
No comments:
Post a Comment