This paper discusses the phonological properties of words and phrases in two Northern Arawak languages of the Upper Rio Negro, Brazil. These features are h-prosody, vowel harmony triggered by the glottal fricative h, vowel nasalization and vowel diphthongization. A feature that is used to mark a word in one language may mark a phrase in the other. There is a regular interdependence between morphemes and syllables.
The most unusual characteristic of the languages is the existence of pausal forms which mark phrase-final and utterance-final boundaries. The phonological character of pause marking devices, viewed cross-linguistically, contradicts a wide-spread assumption about the entirely phonetic realization of pauses.
2010. Developments in the Study of Intonational Typology. Language and Linguistics Compass 4:9 ► pp. 874 ff.
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.
2003. Typological parameters for the study of clitics, with special reference to Tariana. In Word, ► pp. 42 ff.
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.
2021. Removing the Owner: Non‐Specified Possessor Marking in Arawak Languages*. Studia Linguistica 75:2 ► pp. 175 ff.
Dixon, R. M. W. & Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
2003. Word: a typological framework. In Word, ► pp. 1 ff.
[no author supplied]
1998. References. In Handbook of Amazonian Languages, Volume 4,
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