科研之友
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摘要
Seediq is a Formosan language belonging to the Atayalic subgroup (Li 1981). This paper reports a (morpho-)phonological process called dorsal consonant harmony found in the language with the data based on the Truku dialect. Two contrastive segments-voiceless velar stop /k/ and voiceless uvular stop /q/-are involved, and the latter is derived in morphophonemic contexts. This process operates not only between morpheme boundaries, but also within morpheme roots, showing that the k...q/ sequence is unattested, and only very few /q...k/ sequences are found. However, with the introduction of a rule which changes labials to velars in word-final position, this root-internal restriction is gradually loosened (cf. Li 1980). An observation of the data also reveals that heteromorphemic alternation of dorsal consonant harmony involves both derivational and inflectional prefixes; hence it is controlled by fixed right-to-left directionality. Theoretically speaking, this assimilation process is considered as a non-local correspondence rather than a spreading of the dorsal feature [high] or [retracted tongue root] (cf. Hansson 2001), since the intervening oral segments are transparent to the operation without any opacity effect, i.e. the intervening vowels are lowered only if immediately adjacent to a uvular. A theoretical interpretation is provided following the model of contrastive hierarchy in phonology (Dresher 2003, Mackenzie 2005) and feature specifications of both segments, suggesting that the segment /q/ in this language possesses double domination (McCarthy 1994) in both oral and pharyngeal cavities, thus enforcing the harmony of a hetero-morphemic /k/ in order to ease production difficulties. A similar morpheme-internal harmony is also mentioned in other Atayalic dialects such as Squliq and Skikun (Li 1980). A diachronic implication gained from this observation is that dorsal consonant harmony is probably a pan-Atayalic phenomenon.
- 出版日期2009-7
- 单位东华大学
