The Phonology of Yurok Glottalized Sonorants: Segmental Fission under Syllabification

Yurok, an endangered Algic language of northwest California, has a series of glot- talized sonorants which contrast with plain nonglottalized sonorants. Glottalized sono- rants have interesting phonological properties which distinguish them from other segment types in Yurok, including a restriction to postvocalic environments and fission under syllabification. In this paper, I analyze sound patterns involving Yurok glottal- ized sonorants and discuss their implications for phonological theory. (K eywords : Yurok, phonology, glottalized sonorants, syllabification) 1. Introduction. Yurok, an Algic language of northwestern California, has a series of glottalized sonorants which contrast with their plain nonglot- talized counterparts. Glottalized sonorants show distinct distributions from other segment types. Though there is good evidence that they are single seg- ments, in intervocalic position they are syllabified as clusters, with glottal stop closing one syllable and a sonorant opening the next. In this study, I describe the distribution of glottalized sonorants and suggest that segmental fission under syllabification is the result of word-based syllabification algorithms which are based on surface associations between word and syllable edges. The primary published data sources for this study are Kroeber (1911), Waterman (1920), Spott and Kroeber (1942), Robins (1958) = (R), Berman (1982 a ) = (B), Sapir (2001), and Exline (n.d.). The primary unpublished data for this work comes from my 2001-2003 fieldwork with the six speak- ers mentioned in footnote 1. These data consist primarily of elicitations but also include spontaneous speech and short narratives; in many cases, the same forms were confirmed by two or three different speakers, and also occur in published sources.