Date of Award

12-1990

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Linguistics

First Advisor

Stephen A. Marlett

Abstract

This thesis is a description of the phonology of Salasaca Quichua (SQ), a member of the Quechua II or A language family. There are 26 phonemes which include three aspirated voiceless stops and three voiced stops.

Voiced stops have fricative allophones in intervocalic environments. There are two underspecified segments (/G/ and /N/) whose phonological realization depends on the environment which follows. The /G/ may be realized as [g], [ǥ], [k], or [x]. The /N/ may be realized as a bilabial, alveolar, alveopalatal, palatal or velar nasal.

The syllable structure of SQ has a maximal syllable template of [CCVC]. I analyze the syllable template and conditions based on Prosodic Phonology and Junko Ito’s proposals of Prosodic Phonology’s application.

Five postpositional segments, /ža/, /mi/, /da/, /ga/ and /ču/, are posited for SQ based on the failure of these postpositions to cause the usual penultimate stress on words they follow. In addition, stress is used to show that /ma/ is a separate word.

Included in

Linguistics Commons

Share

COinS