‘Nice’ palatals and ‘nasty’ dentals: Affect marking and the structure of Mapudungun coronal consonants

The South American language Mapudungun (arn) has a fairly dense inventory of contrast- ive coronal consonants, including stops/affricates, fricatives, nasals and laterals, across dental, alveolar, retroflex and (alveolo)palatal places of articulation (/t,̪ t, t͡ʃ, ʈ͡ʐ, θ, s, ʃ, ʐ, n̪, n, ɲ, l,̪ l, ʎ/ — cf. Sadowsky et al. 2013). It has long been observed (cf. Febrés 1765), however, that these segments alternate with each other in ways that are neither lexically nor phonologically predictable, and which can be attributed to affect. Indeed, we find that words with a neutral affect take on a positive or diminutive meaning when a coronal is palatalised (see 1a-c), while they take on a pejorative or augmentative meaning when the coronal is dentalised (see 1d-f) (Catrileo 1986, 2010, Salas 1992).

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a. [θiweɲ] ‘companion’ vs. [ʃiweɲ] ‘dear companion’

b. [malen] ‘maiden’ vs. [maʎeɲ] ‘lovely/little maiden’

c. [ʈ͡ʐewa] ‘dog’ vs. [t͡ʃewa] ‘doggy’

d. [kuʐe] ‘wife’ vs. [kuθe] ‘hag’

e. [nelan] ‘I didn’t take it’ vs. [ɲel̪aɲ] ‘I didn’t take it, damn it!’

f. [fejti] ‘this’ vs. [fejt̪i] ‘this (damn/nasty)’

The link between palatal consonants and diminution or positive affect is cross-linguistically common (cf. Nichols 1971, Alderete and Kochetov 2017), falling within the category of what Hinton et al. (1994: 4) call ‘synaesthetic’ sound-symbolism, that is, “acoustic symbolization of non-acoustic phenomena”. More typologically unexpected is the dentalisation pattern, which has no obvious acoustic counterpart for size or affect, pointing to a more arbitrary (Saussurean) relation.

Be this as it may, structurally, the affective phenomena in Mapudungun consonants are interesting for two reasons: on the one hand, they target only coronal segments (dorsals and labials do not undergo palatalisation or dentalisation); on the other hand, the affective forms share a laminal articulation, either in the form of a (alvoelo)palatal or an interdental con- striction. These facts suggest that featural activation has a clear hierarchical organisation in Mapudungun, where the features [coronal] as well as [apical] play a meaningful role.

In order to probe the robustness of the pattern, in this talk I will provide evidence from native speaker elicitation and historical corpus data spanning the 400-year textual record for Mapudungun (Molineaux and Karaiskos 2021). Focusing on diachrony, I will show that a trend towards lexicalisation in inherently positive and negative vocabulary (/pɨti/>/pɨt͡ʃi/ ‘wee’; /weʐa/>/weθa/ ‘bad’) coexists with the longstanding productive use of these phono-affective processes. Focusing on synchrony I propose a featural analysis of the language’s conson- antal system, couched in the theory of Contrastive Hierarchy (Dresher 2009), where specific predictions about the target subset of segments for feature spreading can be formulated. Fi- nally, I consider different potential formalisations to account for the phenomenon of affective phonological alternations, settling on the most parsimonious approach: affective meanings are elements in the morphological grammar whose sole exponents are floating phonological fea- tures. These take the shape of [–apical], as the general marker of affect, and a subordinate feature, [±anterior], indicating the polarity of said affect. Crucially, these features only attach to the [coronal] node in an autosegmental tier, thus bypassing dorsals and labials.