The data below come from Ventureño Chumash, an American Indian language previously spoken in coastal Central California. Some phonological notes: [sʰ] and [ʃʰ] are aspirated sibilants, and each functions as a contrastive unit of sound. Assume all symbols used for Ventureño Chumash have IPA values with the exception of <y>, which represents a voiced palatal approximant. The following affixes have the following meanings.
k-
‘first person subject’
p-
‘second person subject’
t͡s-, t͡ʃ-
‘third person subject’
is-, iʃ-
‘dual subject’
iy-
‘plural subject’
am-
‘unspecified’ (when one doesn’t know how many were involved)
-(n)waʃ
‘past tense’
-us
‘third person indirect object’ (meaning ‘for him’)
-(n)Vt͡ʃ
verb-forming suffix that means, ‘to have the property of the root noun’ (the vowel in this suffix varies)
Do a phonological analysis and account for the fricative consonant alternations of the third person prefix and dual prefix.
A. Analyze the data in Tables 1-4. 1) Determine the underlying form of the third person prefix and the dual prefix, and 2) write a single generative rule that predicts which sibilants will occur in what environments in the third person subject and dual subject prefixes. Your rule must use features from the feature chart, and your rule should not resort to using individual IPA symbols. Assume that the infinitive verb forms, such as nǝw ‘to sing,’ represent the underlying verb forms. Assume that nouns without suffixes, such as ʔeyus, are in their underlying form.
B. The data in Table 5 (noun/verb pairs) are given to let you test your rule above. If you can write a correct rule accounting for the alternations in the third person and dual prefixes, it will also work to account for the alternations found in the noun roots in the noun/verb pairs.
