The Synchronic and Diachronic Phonology of Ejectives

Paul D. Fallon

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415938006
• eBook ISBN: 9781136712524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This study is the first book-length examination of ejectives and their phonological patterning, deepening the empirical understanding of ejectives and contributing to both phonological theory and to typologies of sound change.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1.1. Overview

A small number of autosegmental operations in phonology such as spreading, deletion, fusion, and fission, in conjunction with a hierarchical structure of features, accounts for the major processes which ejectives undergo. Ejectives are relatively common but understudied speech sounds which have never received systematic treatment in terms of their phonological effects, both synchronic and diachronic. This thesis proposes a typology of phonological change and alternations for ejectives, drawing together widely-scattered information on the phonological behavior of ejectives.

The second part of this introduction answers the question, What are ejectives? It briefly explains their physical production and recounts their discovery and description by linguists. The next section notes the paradox that ejectives, far from being an ‘exotic’ sound, are found in almost one in five languages of the world, including occasionally in English and French, yet they have never been the subject of a thorough phonological study. The fourth section provides the three chief motivations of this study: theoretical, empirical, and historical. Ejectives play an important role in the theoretical arena with respect to feature privativity, and they can also be used to test models of feature geometry. Empirically, since little is known about ejectives as a whole, it is important for phonology to account for these sounds. And historically, ejectives and their possible sound changes are one of the most contentious issues surrounding the Glottalic Theory of Indo-European, which reconstructs ejectives in PIE. This will be discussed more in §1.4.3.

The methodology of this thesis is described in Section 1.5. Over 150 grammars of languages with ejectives were studied, based on a quota sample of the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (UPSID), and later expanded on the basis of available grammars. This thesis thus has a thorough, empirical, and cross-linguistic basis involving a wide range of various types of data. Section 1.6 explains the use of the IPA in all the transcriptions of this dissertation and discusses problems of transcription. The last section provides an overview of the organization of this work.

1.2. What Are Ejectives?

Ejectives are speech sounds, typically a stop or affricate (and rarely a fricative), made with a glottalic egressive airstream mechanism. Ejectives are formed with roughly simultaneous closure of the vocal folds and a constriction in the oral cavity (which could be between the lips and the uvula). The larynx is then raised like a piston about one centimeter, compressing the air between the glottis and the oral constriction (Ladefoged 1982: 120). Then the oral stricture is released, followed by the opening of the vocal folds. A ‘popping sound’ is created as the compressed air is released from the mouth. Because these sounds are quite rare in Europe, their description and production have caused linguists problems for hundreds of years. Take, for example, Ludolf’s (1661) Grammatica Æthiopica, a grammar of Amharic, which, incidentally, according to Ullendorff (1955), was the first to introduce the apostrophe notation for ejective sounds¹:

However, among all these the most notable and difficult in pronunciation are the following: k’, t’, s’, z’, p’ which examples are not found in the whole of Europe. They closely resemble those letters, which on account of the difference we note in our syllabary by an apostrophe, but in so strong collision of articulators, and which are carried out in a reverberation of sound, that one can fully imitate them only slowly and with difficulty. [Translation: PDF²]

Ludolf’s last remark was echoed by other scholars. Doke (1923:706–707) mentions later attempts at describing the velar ejective affricate in Zulu:

This is perhaps the most difficult Zulu sound for a foreigner to acquire, and one of the most difficult to describe without practical demonstration. In fact Elliott, in his Tebele Dictionary³, writes of it as totally indescribable and impossible for a European to acquire, with the added encouraging remark that it is very seldom used. Döhne⁴, too, describes it as ‘kind of choking, very difficult to describe and more so to utter’.

Such sounds also provided difficulty for linguists working with Native American languages; see, for example, the confused description by Powell (1880:11–12), which was an early attempt at standardizing a phonetic alphabet.

Even respected linguists, linguistic anthropologists, and speech scientists in the early part of the 1900s had difficulty describing ejectives. Swanton (1911:210), for example, thought that ejectives were due to ‘urging more breath against the articulating organs than can at once pass through them’ (cited in Sapir 1923), though Sapir denied this. Meinhof (1915) referred to sessions of phonetic fieldwork involving ejectives that were conducted in Berlin in which he was accompanied by Eduard Sievers and Hermann Gutzmann. Meinhof states that ‘We had great trouble over the “glottal-stop” sounds, of which one was sometimes disposed to think that there could be no such thing, and which nevertheless do exist.’ (1915:56). Sievers himself, author of Grundzüge der Lautphysiologie (1876), which is considered by Bronstein, Raphael, and Stevens as one of the two major works (along with Sweet 1877) in the nineteenth century ‘to lay the groundwork for the advances in twentieth century experimental phonetics’ (1977:193), had been wrestling with glottalized sounds for some time, as mentioned in Sweet (1877, reprinted in Henderson 1971: 162–3).

Sapir (1923) and in more detail, Trubetzkoy (1926) gave admirable attempts at description, though it was Doke (1923, 1926) who described ejectives quite accurately. Doke (1923:707) in fact coined the term ‘ejective’⁵ (where the symbol <

> below, used to describe the Zulu

is actually a turned

in Doke):

is an affricate sound, but it differs from other affricates in that it is pronounced with simultaneous glottal stop. To designate such glottal stop plosives, I have selected the term ‘ejective’, as being descriptive of the action and the type of sound resulting. Hence

is made up of three elements, the plosive, the fricative, and the glottal stop; and if the special symbol were not adopted,

would have to be indicated by qχʔ.

The term was also used in Doke (1926), and has been widely adopted since then. Their importance in descriptive and field phonetics is reflected in the fact that by 1933 Daniel Jones included ejectives and implosives in his ‘short examination in practical phonetics’ given to J.C. Catford (Catford 1989).

Beach (1938) proposed a phonetic framework which combined ejective release into his description of clicks in Hottentot (Xhosa), and according to Catford (1977a:247), he introduced the terms pulmonic, glottalic, and velaric, though it was not until Catford’s (1939) pioneering work that ejectives were integrated into a basic phonetic description with other obstruents⁶. It was this work that first described them as ‘glottalic pressure stops’. Pike (1943) built on Catford’s description, adding the terms ingressive and egressive and ‘pharyngeal air-stream mechanism’ (90), which has since been renamed ‘glottalic’ airstream mechanism. Thus in current work, ejectives are known as ‘glottalic egressive stops’, a description which has been widely adopted in standard phonetics textbooks (Abercrombie 1967; Ladefoged 1975, 1982, 1993; Catford 1977a, 1988; Laver 1994).

Many additional terms for ejectives cloud the picture. They are often known as ‘glottalized’ consonants, a term which Catford (1977a) objects to on phonetic grounds, since the suffix -ized implies secondary articulation, as in palatalized or velarized; he proposes the term glottalic. Trubetzkoy (1939/1969:217, fn 136) discusses various other names for ejectives in use at the time. I combine his list with other terms I have encountered:

Abruptive (usually only in Russian; Bokarev and Lomtatidze 1967)

Checked stop (along with other sounds; Jakobson, Fant, and Halle 1952)

Consonant of supraglottal expiration (Jakovlev 1923)

Consonant with glottal occlusion (cited in Trubetzkoy 1939[1969])

Evulsive (Rousselot 1897–1908)

Glottalic pressure stops (Catford 1939)

Glottalic egressive consonant (Ladefoged 1982)

Glottalized consonant (Committee of American Anthropological Association 1916)

Glottal stop sounds (Meinhof 1915)

Glottocclusive / glottal occlusive (Trubetzkoy 1931a)

Recursive (Trubetzkoy 1922, 1939 [1969:145–6])

Although ejectives were finally accurately described impressionistically in the 1920s, they were not thoroughly examined instrumentally or acoustically until the past twenty years. The earliest instrumental work which I am aware of comes from Rousselot (1897–1908), who provided kymographic, laryngographic, and palatographic figures of various Georgian ejectives. Selmer (1935) contains a few instrumental measures, again on Georgian sounds, including ejectives. Another pioneering effort, though dated today, is Sumner’s (1949, 1957) work on Amharic. Most of the more significant instrumental work is reported in Catford (1977a, 1992), Dent (1981), Fre Woldu (1979, 1986), Hogan (1976), Kingston (1982, 1985a, b), Lindau (1984), Lindsey, Hayward and Haruna (1992), Pinkerton (1986), Khachatrian (1996), and Warner (1996). In addition, several recent issues of UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics which treat ‘fieldwork studies of targeted languages’ contain useful descriptions of ejectives. For more detail on the phonetics of ejectives, see §6.6.

Now that we have seen what ejectives are and how they have been described phonetically, we turn to their distribution in the languages of the world.

1.3. The Commonness of Ejectives

According to Henton, Ladefoged, and Maddieson (1992), ejectives are the fourth most common type of stop in the world’s languages, after voiceless unaspirated stops, voiced stops, and voiceless aspirated stops. Estimates of their occurrence in the world’s languages vary slightly, ranging from 16.5% to 20%. The UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (UPSID) version 1.1 (1992) contains 69 languages with ejective stops, affricates and/or fricatives, from a quota sample of 417 languages (16.5%). An earlier version of UPSID (published as Maddieson 1984) had a quota sample of 53 ejectives out of 317 languages (16.7%)⁷. Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996:78), referring to Maddieson (1984), note that ejectives occur in ‘about 18%’ of the world’s languages. Ruhlen’s (1976) survey (cited in Bomhard 1984:138), contained 129 ejectives in 693 languages (18.6%), and Catford (1992:193) pushed the estimate to ‘about 20%’. Compare this frequency with that of other ‘exotic’ sounds: implosives (10%) and clicks (1%) (Maddieson 1984).

In contrast to the quota samples, I have conducted a count of the number of languages in which I could confirm, through printed sources, the presence of ejectives, discounting potentially ambiguous terms like ‘glottalized’. Of the 4,794 natural, living languages listed in Ruhlen (1991), at least 241 (5.0%) languages have been reported to contain ejectives⁸. This is quite a conservative number, not controlled for sample; it simply reflects what I can confirm at the present time through published grammars. The number does not include ejectives found in languages now extinct such as Wiyot, Chemakum, Tillamook, etc. By my count, Ruhlen (1991) lists another 476 extinct languages, of which I can be sure at least 34 had ejectives. This would bring the minimum total to 275 of 5,270 languages (5.2%). Again, though, let me remind the reader that there are many grammars and languages that I have not been able to consult which may well contain ejectives, bringing the total more in line with the quota samples.

Ejectives can be found in many major language phyla listed in Ruhlen (1991). They are found in virtually all Kartvelian and North Caucasian language families, as well as Na-Dene, Wakashan, and Salishan. They are pervasive in the Ethiopian Semitic and Penutian families. Other language phyla in which they occur, some as the apparent result of borrowing, include: Khoisan (!Xóõ); Niger-Kordofanian (Koma); Nilo-Saharan (Ik); Indo-European (Eastern Armenian); Altaic (Kumyk); Austric (Yapese); and ‘Amerind’ (Quileute). I have not found ejectives in Uralic-Yukaghir, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut, Elamo-Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, Indo-Pacific, or Australian⁹, and many of the families listed under the controversial ‘Amerind’ such as Algonquian and Iroquoian.

We do not, however, have to go so far afield to encounter ejectives at the phonetic level, since they are found sporadically even in English and French (Abercrombie 1967: 29). Gimson and Cruttenden (1994:146) describe phonetic realizations of stops in English:

In other, rarer cases there may be some compression of the air between the glottal and oral closures by means of the raising of the larynx and a constriction of the pharyngeal cavity, resulting in a potential ejective release. In such a case the plosive is no longer glottally reinforced or glottalized but is instead produced using the egressive glottalic (or pharyngeal) airstream mechanism. This is rather more common in some dialects (e.g. South Lancashire) than in RP.

Shuken (1984:120–121) has published a spectrogram of a Glasgow English speaker’s pronunciation of the word great, which was phonetically realized as [gre:ʔt’], with creaky voice at the end of the vowel, simultaneous glottal and alveolar closure, and ejective release. Shorrocks (1988) reports that in the speech of Greater Bolton, twelve miles northwest of Manchester, for final /p, t, k/ ‘occasionally an ejective consonant is encountered: [nıi:t’] ‘night’, [wık’] ‘week” (60). Similar reports may be found in Taylor (1995:224), who notes that ‘in utterance-final position, the alveolar closure of /t/ may be released ejectively: [t’]. This is particularly common in highly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abstract
• Preface to the Routledge Edition
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Assimilation
• 3. Deglottalization
• 4. Debuccalization
• 5. Dissimilation
• 6. Ejective Voicing
• 7. Fission and Fusion
• 8. Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Language Index