New paper: Kochetov and Arsenault (2019)

Alexei Kochetov (faculty) and Paul Arsenault (Ph.D. 2012, now at Tyndale University College) have a paper available in the Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, 6(2): "Kalasha affricates: An acoustic analysis of place contrasts." 

Affricates are not uncommon in consonant inventories of world languages. However, most languages have affricates at a single place of articulation (e. g. postalveolars /ʧ, ʤ/; Maddieson 1984). In Maddieson and Precoda’s (1990) sample of 451 languages, only 18% of them have affricates at two places, and just 3% have affricates at three places. The latter group includes Burushaski (isolate), Jaqaru (Aymaran), Mandarin Chinese (Sino-Tibetan), and Mazatec (Oto-Manguean), where affricates contrast at the dental/alveolar, retroflex, and alveolopalatal places of articulation. Kalasha and other Indo-Iranian (Indo-Aryan and Nuristani) languages of the Hindu-Kush region are not part of this sample, but they exhibit equally complex place contrasts in affricates, which are not characteristic of other Indo-Iranian languages. For instance, Kalasha features a three-way place contrast (dental, retroflex, and alveolopalatal) with four laryngeal qualities: voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, voiced, and breathy voiced. Such complex feature combinations are highly unusual in affricates, being reported in only two cases in Maddieson and Precoda’s sample: Naxi (Sino-Tibetan) and Hmong (Hmong-Mien). In this paper we examine properties of the typologically rare set of affricates in Kalasha, focusing on the acoustic realization of place across various laryngeal contrasts and syllable positions. Our results demonstrate that the three-way place contrast in Kalasha affricates is robustly distinguished by noise spectra during burst/frication and by formant transitions during adjacent vowels, while showing some variation across different laryngeal classes. These results extend the phonetic typology of coronal place contrasts, highlighting some general and language-specific aspects of the phonetic realization of affricates. In addition, the results of the study contribute to the general phonetic documentation of Kalasha, the language of a culturally and linguistically threatened community of Northern Pakistan (Rahman 2006; Khan and Heegård Petersen 2016).