Ebook: Phonology and Phonetics in Coatzospan Mixtec

BACKGROUND This book focuses on two major issues - vowel glottalization and nasalization - in the phonology and phonetics of Coatzospan Mixtec (henceforth CM). CM is an Otomanguean language currently spoken by roughly 2000 people (Small 1990) in the village of San Juan Coatzospan, which is located in the Sierra Mazateca of northern Oaxaca, Mexico.' Though Mixtec constitutes a major branch of the Otomanguean family, the so-called dialects are most appropriately viewed as distinct languages. According to Josserand (1982), there are at least 22 mutually unintelligible varieties of Mixtec. For its part, CM is among the most isolated. Located in the mountains, the village is surrounded entirely by Mazatec speaking communities. Only two other Mixtec languages exhibit over a 25% rate of mutual intelligibility with CM (Josserand 1982). And though it is not clear how this group of Mixtecs came to settle in what is a Mazatec speaking area, their isolation has given rise to special properties not shared by other varieties of the language. Major elements of both the phonology of vowel glottalization and nasalization under focus in this book are, to my knowledge, unique to CM among the Mixtec languages.

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This book provides a detailed analysis of two major aspects - glottalization and nasalization - of the phonology and phonetics of Coatzospan Mixtec, as well as an overview of the segmental phonology of the language. From a descriptive perspective, this work provides the first published phonetic data on Coatzospan Mixtec, one of the many underdescribed indigenous languages of the Americas. Of theoretical importance, the phonological analyses of glottalization and nasalization serve as examples of how optimality theory can be implemented in the extended treatment of a single language, in contrast to the typological emphasis of most optimality research. By focusing in detail on the whole of nasalization and glottalization systems, the book explores the implications of optimality theory for the traditional notion of underlying representation in phonological theory and motivates an extension of the mechanism of constraint conjunction to include conditional relations holding between distinct constraints in the grammar. At the same time, the phonetic analyses provide an example of a detailed treatment of the phonetic implementation of nasalization and glottalization in the Windows framework. Of special interest here is the relation between phonetic data and phonological feature specification. In particular, the data illustrate the complexity of the relationship between patterns of phonetic implementation and feature specification and lead to the conclusion that phonetic data must be interpreted in the context of the phonological system from which they are derived.
This book is of interest to linguists in general, and especially to researchers in both phonology and phonetics, to those interested in field work on underdescribed languages, and to those interested in Native American languages and linguistics.