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Vowels and tones in Sarcee

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

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

A taxonomic phonemic analysis of Sarcee, an Athapaskan language of Canada, has recognized two length phonemes which may co-occur with any of four vowels—a, i, u, and o. The phonemic inventory has also included six inflected tones besides three level tones. The present generative analysis recognizes only one underlying vowel length and three level tones as distinctive. Tones are further classified into three functional categories: lexical, paradigmatic, and syntagmatic. The syntagmatic tone, which is parallel to the terrace-level tone of Bantu languages, can be predicted by some general rules. The generative account of this tone, however, presents a case which contradicts an empirical assumption. Also noted is the step-up feature of Sarcee which is comparable to the step-down feature of Xhosa and other Bantu languages.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , March 1971, pp. 164 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I wish to express my gratitude to Harry Hoijer and to the linguistics staff of the University of Alberta, for making Sapir's field notes available to me. Without the original data collected by Sapir, it would not have been possible for me to write this paper. I would also like to thank M. R. Haas, H. Hoijer, F.-K. Li, B. H. Smeaton, G. D. Prideaux, D. G. Frantz, and W. S-Y. Wang, for reading earlier versions of this paper and offering valuable criticisms and suggestions. However, any errors remaining are entirely my own. This work was supported in part by the Canada Council grant 69-0292.

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