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INT-BILAT-BILAT-ordningen

USA - Saami phonology: Fieldwork and analysis

Awarded: NOK 0.15 mill.

This project extends work undertaken earlier at UiTø looking into the complex phonology of Saami. The scientific study of Saami phonology faces significant limitations because published materials often derive from many dialects, and because many reference works only provide orthographic forms, even though the relation between spelling and phonetic value is obscure in Saami. Our project addresses these problems by providing extensive phonetically transcribed and paradigmatically organised data from a singl e dialect. These transcriptions include information on vowel length and the apparently contrastive location of the stress-peak, features which are often disregarded in written work on Saami. Our initial research from 1999-2000 concentrated on establishing phonemic contrasts and identifying basic paradigmatic data. This has led to tenative conclusions about Saami, and a preliminary account of certain major morphophonemic changes which are valid for a particular subset of the language. We now focus on testi ng hypotheses formed during the initial fieldwork stage, especially regarding how many distinctive patterns length there are. Our goal is to dramatically reduce the empirical lacunae in Saami phonological dcumentation, by extensive data-gathering and anal ysis. Phonological problems regarding the directionality of the gradation alternations and their relationship to distributional gaps in segments will be investigated. We especially focus on vowel length, the problem of stress-shift in the syllable, and th e phenomenon of allegro forms, which involves shortening of vowels. We will extend the domain of data-coverage to include trisyllabic vowel-final nouns, and the entire class of consonant-final nouns. We will also extend our database to include verb inflec tions. This research project will be implemented via regular elicitation and recording sessions during the spring semester of 2007, if Prof. Odden receives funding to come to Tromsø.

Funding scheme:

INT-BILAT-BILAT-ordningen

Thematic Areas and Topics

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