Phonology and Phonetics in Coatzospan Mixtec (review)

Coatzospan Mixtec (CM) is an Otomanguean language with about 2,000 native speakers, most living in a mountainous area of northern Oaxaca, Mexico. Surrounded by speakers of the unrelated Mazatec, CM is the most isolated and possibly the most divergent language among the two dozen or so mutually unintelligible varieties of what is generally called ‘Mixtec’. Very little previous work has been published on CM phonology, with the exception of an analysis of the language’s tonal properties (Eunice V. Pike and Priscilla Small, ‘Downstepping terrace tone in Coatzospan Mixtec’, Advances in tagmemics, ed. by Ruth Brend, 105–34. Amsterdam: North Holland, 1974) and an important general study of Mixtec dialects (Judy Kathryn Josser and, Mixtec dialect history, New Orleans: Tulane dissertation, 1982). Gerfen’s monograph is the first in-depth account of CM phonetics and phonology. All of the data presented derive from the author’s work with native speakers either in the village of San Miguel Coatzospan, Oaxaca, or with a native-speaker informant in Tucson, AZ. Most of the sophisticated acoustic measurements that form the study’s database were made in the field.

One of G’s stated aims is to investigate an under-described language ‘to test putative phonetic and phonological universal claims across a range of linguistic data’ (1). Ch. 2, ‘A phonological sketch’ (19–48), covers the segmental phonology and also explains the morphophonemic composition of open class roots which form a bimoraic structure called a ‘couplet’ and normally bear phonemically contrasting tones. Affixes tend to be monomoraic and lack inherent tone. This discussion revisits earlier work on other Mixtec language forms (Kenneth Pike, Tone languages, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1948) and serves as a preliminary to G’s primary concern—an analysis of nasalization and glottalization, two of the language’s most interesting prosodic features. The equally interesting role of palatalization, though briefly introduced (40–6), is left for future study.

Ch. 3 discusses glottalization (49–120), which G treats as a prosodic feature of vowel nuclei rather than a consonantal phoneme. Optimality theory is invoked to account for the phonemic and allophonic manifestations of glottal closure, both of which are restricted in environment to the stressed vowel. G uses a Windows model adopted from Patricia A. Keating (‘The Windows Model of coarticulation’, The special status of coronals: Internal and external evidence, ed. by Carole Paradis and Jean-François Prunet, 29–48. San Diego: Academic Press, 1990) to analyze the implementation of CM glottalization. Ch. 4 deals with nasalization (121–211), using optimality theory to produce an elegant account of the various functions that velum lowering contributes to CM phonology. The regressive nasal harmony used in CM as a morphological marker of the second person singular is best known in the literature, but G accounts for phonemic and purely allophonic distributions of nasality as well. Nasal airflow data are used to measure the timing of velum lowering, affording more precision that could be achieved using transcription symbols alone. Four appendixes reproduce flow data graphs for all words used in the study.

Regardless of the particular value one places on optimality theory or the other formalisms G uses, the sophistication of phonetic detail he succeeds in conveying in this pioneering description of CM phonology reflects language documentation at its very best.