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Chilcotin Flattening*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Eung-Do Cook
Eung-Do Cook*
Affiliation:
The University of Calgary
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Extract

In Chilcotin, an Athapaskan language of northern British Columbia, surface alternations of vowels are determined by a process called “flattening” (Krauss 1975, Cook 1976a). So far, the process of flattening, and indeed almost all other aspects of Chilcotin phonology, remain virtually unknown to phonologists in general. In this article, I provide a descriptive introduction to Chilcotin flattening. The first two sections describe the vowel and consonant systems, respectively, in terms of autonomous phonology, and the third section describes the flattening process and introduces some of the theoretical issues associated with it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , Fall 1983 , pp. 123 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1983

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Footnotes

*

I wish to express my thanks to many Chilcotin people, especially Bella Alphonse, Maria Myers, and Stanley Stump for their continued work that has provided me with the material in this article, to Michael Krauss and Quindel King for many hours of discussion, to Alan Haig-Brown for his kind logistic support and endless enthusiasm which has brought Chikotin to many classrooms, and to Jack Chambers who helped me to make this paper more readable. Any remaining errors are my own. This work has been supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

References

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