 | Apophony: Encyclopedia II - Apophony - Types of apophony
Apophony - Types of apophony
Apophony may involve various types of alternations, including vowels, consonants, prosodic elements (such as tone, syllable length), and even smaller features, such as nasality (on vowels).
The sound alternations may be used inflectionally or derivationally. The particular function of a given alternation will depend on the language.
Apophony - Vowel apophony ablaut
Apophony often involves vowels. Indo-European ablaut (also commonly called Indo-European vowel gradation) is very well known. The English example previously cited above demonstrates vowel ablaut. Another example is from Dinka:
| Singular |
Plural |
gloss |
vowel alternation |
| dom |
dum |
'field/fields' |
(o-u) |
| kat |
kɛt |
'frame/frames' |
(a-ɛ) |
(Bauer 2003:35)
The vowel alternation may involve more than just a change in vowel quality. In Athabascan languages, such as Navajo, verbs have series of stems where the vowel alternates (sometimes with an added suffix) indicating a different tense-aspect. Navajo vowel ablaut, depending on the verb, may be a change in vowel, vowel length, nasality, and/or tone. For example, the verb stem -kaah/-ką́ "to handle an open container" has a total of 16 combinations of the 5 modes and 4 aspects, resulting in 7 different verb stem forms (i.e. -kaah, -kááh, -kaał, -kááł, -ka’, -ká, -ką́).
Another verb stem -géésh/-gizh "to cut" has a different set of alternations and mode-aspect combinations, resulting in 3 different forms (i.e. -géésh, -gizh, -gish):
Apophony - Prosodic apophony
Various prosodic elements, such as tone, syllable length, and stress, may be found in alternations. For example, Vietnamese has the following tone alternations which are used grammatically:
| |
tone alternation |
| đây "here" |
đấy "there" |
(ngang tone-sắc tone) |
| bây giờ "now" |
bấy giờ "then" |
(ngang tone-sắc tone) |
| kia "there" |
kìa "yonder" |
(ngang tone-huyền tone) |
| cứng "hard" |
cửng "(to) have an erection" |
(sắc tone-hỏi tone) |
(Nguyễn 1997:42-44)
Albanian uses different vowel lengths to indicate number and grammatical gender on nouns:
| [ɡuːr] "stone" |
[ɡur] "stones" |
| [dy] "two (masculine)" |
[dyː] "two (feminine)" |
(Asher 1994:1719)
English has alternating stress patterns that indicate whether related words are nouns (first syllable stressed) or verbs (second syllable stressed):
| noun |
verb |
| éxport |
expórt |
| ínsult |
insúlt |
| pérmit |
permít |
| cónvict |
convíct |
Prosodic alternations are sometimes analyzed as not as a type of apophony but rather as prosodic affixes, which are known, variously, as suprafixes, superfixes, or simulfixes.
Apophony - Consonant apophony mutation
Consonant alternation is commonly known as consonant mutation. Bemba indicates causative verbs through alternation of the stem-final consonant. Here the alternation involves spirantization and palatalization:
| Intransitive Verb |
Causative Verb |
| luba "to be lost" |
lufya "to cause to be lost" |
| koma "to be deaf" |
komya "to cause to be deaf" |
| pona "to fall" |
ponya "to cause to fall" |
| enda "to walk" |
ensha "to cause to walk" |
| lunga "to hunt" |
lunsha "to cause to hunt" |
| kula "to grow" |
kusha "to cause to grow" |
(Kula 2000:174)
Celtic languages are well-known for their initial consonant mutations.
Other related archivesA-mutation, Afro-Asiatic languages, Albanian, Athabascan, Bemba, Broken plural, Celtic languages, Consonant mutation, Dinka, English, English grammar: Irregular verbs, English reduplication, Germanic umlaut, I-mutation, Indo-European, Indo-European ablaut, Linguistic morphology, Modern Standard Arabic, Morphology (linguistics), Navajo, Nonconcatenative morphology, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Indo-European language, U-mutation, Vietnamese, West Germanic strong verb, affixes, archaic plurals in Amharic, aspect, assimilation, causative, consonant mutation, consonants, derivationally, diachronic, gemination, grammatical gender, grammatical number, grammaticalized, infix, inflectional, inflectionally, linguistics, morpheme, morphological, nasality, nonconcatenative, onomatopoeia, palatalization, part of speech, past participle, phonological, prosodic, reduplication, references for ablaut, stress, strong verbs, suffix, suffixes, syllable length, synchronic, templates, tense, tone, transitivity, umlaut, verbs, vowel, vowel harmony, vowel length, vowels, weak verbs
 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Types of apophony", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
