Document Type
Article
Department/Program
Linguistics
Journal Title
International Journal of American Linguistics
Pub Date
1-2015
Volume
81
Issue
1
First Page
83
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Abstract
This paper presents results of the first quantitative phonetic study of Koasati, a Muskogean language spoken in Louisiana and Texas. We examine vowel quality, length contrasts in vowels and consonants, the limited system of lexical tone contrasts in nouns, and the grammatical system of tone in verbs. We also study the realization of several word-final consonant clusters (fn, tl, lw, etc.) that are absent in related languages and that are typologically unusual due to their sonority reversals. Finally, we examine the cognates in related languages of the tones we document in Koasati nouns and verbs.
Recommended Citation
Gordon, Matthew; Martin, Jack B.; and Langley, Linda, Some Phonetic Structures of Koasati (2015). International Journal of American Linguistics, 81(1), 83-118.
https://doi.org/10.1086/679043
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1086/679043
Associated Materials
Supplemental materials can be found at: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/suppl/10.1086/679043
