It has been a busy year so far for us at Living Tongues Institute! In May, we presented three cutting-edge research papers on Munda linguistics at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS 2023) in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Here is the full program.

Members of Living Tongues’ Munda research team traveled from the US and India to attend the conference. We include some pictures of our team below.

Luke Horo, Pamir Gogoi, Bikram Jora, Aman Singha, Ria Borah Sonowal, Kelsey Bialo and Gregory Anderson collaborated on a joint paper entitled “Prominence in Mundari disyllables and inflected polysyllabic nouns.”

ABSTRACT: In this paper, we describe our preliminary findings from an ongoing study of intonation in Mundari, an Austroasiatic language spoken by some two million people in at least four dialects. Here we present a comparative analysis of the system of prominence attested in two such dialects, viz. Hasadaʔ and Naguri. We use as a basis for this preliminary study disyllabic forms of any function and polysyllabic nouns that are inflected for a variety of case, possession, etc. categories. Previous descriptions of Mundari prominence are impressionistic. Such claims of trochaic patterns (Cook 1965), quantity sensitivity (Sinha 1975) or a maximal 3-syllable word (Osada 1992) do not hold up to acoustic instrumental analyses nor are supported statistically. Our analysis is the first such grounded in modern phonetic methodology. Recent instrumental analyses of Sora (Horo, Sarmah and Anderson 2020) and Assam Santali (Horo and Anderson 2021), supported by statistical data, suggest these sister languages of Mundari rather consistently shows prominence cued by intensity, duration and/or fundamental frequency on the second syllable. In this report we offer new statistical and instrumental analyses of Mundari focusing for this study on disyllables and inflected polysyllabic nouns. We compare these findings with the claims made in the literature about the language, as well as with the findings from the more recent studies on related languages. This includes the role of quantity sensitivity (if any) in determining patterns of prominence, what the acoustic cues of prominence in Mundari are and how they conspire to encode the prominent syllable, and whether the maximal phonological word is three syllables or not. All data are taken from field notes.

Pamir Gogoi, Luke Horo, Ria Borah Sonowal, Aman Singha, Bikram Jora, Kelsey Bialo and Gregory Anderson presented a joint paper entitled “Acoustic analysis of Glottal Stops in Mundari.”

ABSTRACT: This study analyzes the phonetic realization of glottal stops in Mundari, an Austroasiatic language. Like most Austroasiatic languages, Mundari has a phonemic glottal stop, which has not yet been instrumentally analyzed. In Assam Sora, a lect of Sora related to Mundari, glottal stops have three different phonetic realizations- including, a complete vocal fold closure, a complete closure accompanied by creaky phonation and a voiced glottal stop (Kalita et al., 2016). In this study, we investigate if the glottal stops in Mundari are acoustically similar to Assam Sora. Surface realization of glottal stops vary cross-linguistically; often realized partially by exhibiting laryngealization instead of a complete stop and these characteristics may vary based on the context (Garellek, 2013). Also, changes in F0, amplitude and spectral measures of source features are some of the widely observed correlates of glottal stops (Hillenbrand et al.,1996; Kalita et al., 2016). However, it has been observed that in naturally spoken continuous speech, these features do not strongly correlate to the realization of glottal stops (Ashby & Przedlacka, 2014). Therefore, in this study we measure changes in F0, amplitude and spectral features both in continuous speech and isolated segments in Mundari.

Gregory Anderson and Opino Gomango co-wrote the following paper that was presented at SEALS 32: “Synchronic and diachronic approaches to the Sora TAM system.”

ABSTRACT: Sora indexes several TAM categories in its verbal system which functionally overlap in complex ways. In Sora, there are at least three different templatic suffixal positions where indices of TAM categories can be found and we are probably dealing with at least two different diachronic layers–older elements tightly bound with the verb stem and before pronominal, with more recently grammaticalized markers after such pronominal markers. More details available in the SEALS 32 abstract booklet.