Banca de DEFESA: RAFAEL ALVES DE OLIVEIRA

Phonetics and phonology of the Aikanã language

Phonology. Phonetics. Nasality. Pitch-accent. Aikanã language.

This study aims to describe and analyze the segmental and prosodic phonology of the Aikanã language, based on formalist theories of Phonology. It is estimated that Aikanã is spoken by about 250 individuals, from a community of 400 people, who lives mostly in two indigenous territories located in the Southeastern region of the Brazilian state of Rondônia, where they form the ethnic majority. The corpus analyzed for this study is comprised of roughly 180 hours of oral data collected in loco, with 10 individuals, in the Tubarão-Latundê indigenous land. For a systematic investigation of Aikanã phonology, this study is divided in six chapters. Chapter 1 presents the ethnohistorical and sociolinguistic characteristics of the Aikanã people, a bibliographic review of relevant linguistic studies, methodological and ethical issues of fieldwork, as well as a morphology sketch, which shows that Aikanã behaves morphologically as an agglutinating language with a tendency to polysynthesis VAN DER VOORT, 2011; 2013, 2015; VAN DER VOORT; BIRCHALL, 2020). Chapter 2 focuses on the phonetic-articulatory and distributional properties of vowels and consonants. This chapter also provides an analysis of syllable structure, syllabification and related phonological processes, with emphasis on cases of coalescence, vowel mutation, elision, vowel lengthening, and glides and diphthongs formation, identified as language specific resources to avoid heterosyllabic vowel sequences. These and other phonological processes are analyzed following the Feature Geometry framework (CLEMENTS; HUME, 1995). In Chapter 3, a phonetic-articulatory study based on static palatography and linguogram methods, aiming to discuss the phonetic-phonological status of anterior coronals, supports the proposal that the features [distributed] and [anterior] are important for feature specification of this class in the language. Chapter 4, a phonetic-phonological analysis of nasality emphasizing the extend and direction of nasal harmony showed that [+nasal] spreads only to segments specified as [+voice], what shows an intrinsic relation between nasality and voicing in this language. Regarding to the accent, the Chapter 5 provides a phonetic study to determine which acoustic correlate was more relevant when comparing stress and unstressed vowels, shows that only F0 was relevant. This indicates that Aikanã patterns as a pitch-accent language (BECKMAN, 1986; VAN DER HULST, 2011). Chapter 6 discusses the phonology of word-stress for verbs and non-verbs, and shows that the stress is free, contrastive, insensitive to syllable-weight, and unlimited. In distributional terms, the lexical stress tends to be marked to the left-edged stressed morpheme or, depending on dominance relations (cf. HALLE; VERGNAUD, 1987a,b), it can also be assigned to the right-edge stressed morpheme.