A phonology of mbaham : reduction & contrast

Abstract

Mbaham is a non-Austronesian language spoken by approximately one thousand people, living in several villages in the Onin region of the Bomberai peninsula in West Papua, Indonesia. Mbaham and two related languages, Iha and Karas, are classified as West Bomberai languages of the Trans-New Guinea family (Ross 2005; Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2014). This thesis examines Mbaham phonology focusing on the language-internal conflict between effort reduction, on one hand, and distinctiveness on the other. These two forces have been shown to play a significant role in shaping phonological inventories and motivating phonological processes cross-linguistically (e.g. Lindblom 1983; 1990; Maddieson 2010; Kirchner 1998; 2001; Flemming 2004; Hayes, Kirchner & Steriade 2004). In the present dissertation, several topics are discussed in relation to this problematic, including vowel reduction, consonant lenition, assibilation, prenasalization and stop contrasts. The phonological analysis is supported by acoustic studies and articulatory observations. In Mbaham, some consonants and vowels are more reduced than others, depending on word position and stress placement. Immediately pretonic vowels are phonologically and phonetically reduced compared to stressed and post-tonic vowels. Non-initial consonants are lenited intervocalically and the inventory of word final obstruents is smaller than in the word initial position. Effort minimization in the production of consonants affects both oral and laryngeal gestures. Distinctiveness is enhanced for segments in strong positions, i.e. in stressed or word initial syllables; whereas gesture economy dominates in weaker positions. This study shows that there are language-specific rules that determine what phonetic principles are important for the phonology. It also finds that additional principles, such as feature economy, play a role in the language. By addressing several issues of Mbaham phonology, this analysis contributes to research on phonological typology that has often overlooked New Guinea languages and languages of the Pacific, representing almost 20% of the world's linguistic diversity (Foley 2000; Lewis et al. 2014). It is one of the few linguistic descriptions that propose a detailed phonological account of a non-Austronesian language of New Guinea, including the description of patterns typically found in other languages of the region, like prenasalization and dental discrepancy. It is also one of the few descriptions that present this level of phonetic details in support of the phonological analysis, for a language in this area. Finally, this study presents data collected with Mbaham informants during fieldwork in the Onin region. This new material will serve further descriptive and diachronic work on the under-studied West Bomberai language family. Show more