Laryngeals in Guarijío (Uto-Aztecan): Synchrony

Abstract:

This paper examines the synchronic status of laryngeal consonants (glottal stop and h) in Guarijío, a Uto-Aztecan language of Chihuahua and Sonora, Mexico. I focus on their word-internal distribution in roots and affixes and their behavior under reduplication, showing that both have a very limited distribution and arguing that a different analysis is appropriate for each. I argue that h is a consonantal phoneme (as usually assumed), and claim that its deletion from the coda of the base under reduplication may be a consequence of backcopying to match its codaless reduplicant. Such would be consistent with other backcopying-like reduplicative morphology in the language, such as templatic backcopying to a syllable in the “abbreviated” class of reduplication (Caballero 2006). Glottal stops, on the other hand, are limited to following the first vowel in all contexts. I make the novel claim that these consonants appear as floating root features rather than underlying consonants, following Macaulay and Salmons’ (1995) proposal for similar facts in Mixtec. Guarijío laryngeals provide important sources of evidence for different aspects of comparative Uto-Aztecan historical phonology, so these synchronic analyses help form a firmer basis for future work in historical reconstruction.