Parallel variation

in two speech
communities:
a comparison of final /n/ elision
in Idi and Ende

Dineke Schokkin Kate L. Lindsey

The Australian National University Stanford University
 Big questions (cf. Evans 2018)
❖ Is there something special about the patterning of
variation in small-scale speech communities (Stanford
& Preston 2009)?

❖ To what extent can results of variation studies be

applied to societies in different times or places?
❖ On the one hand, the ‘uniformitarian principle’ (Labov
1972) is assumed to apply to historical contexts
❖ On the other, we must be ‘wary of extrapolating
backward in time to neolithic preurban societies’
(Labov 1994)
 Why do it?
❖ There is evidence that we cannot assume the
“uniformitarian principle” to hold:
❖ Rates of linguistic change are different between
WEIRD and small-scale societies like in southern New
Guinea
❖ Rates and types of multilingualism are very different
between societies
❖ Conditions of language acquisition are different
between societies
 Advantages and
disadvantages
❖ Advantages
❖ Sample size as a proportion of total population
❖ Faster rates of linguistic change

❖ Disadvantages
❖ Ethnographic and social context less accessible
❖ No access to historical data
❖ Lack of comparative data
 Idi and Ende
Idi Ende
Pahoturi River family
~1600 speakers in 6 settlements ~1000 speakers in 2 settlements
Settlements map
Täme ❖ This research: four Idi and
two Ende settlements
Ende
❖ Primary contact lgs.
through intermarriage:
Idi: Nen, Täme
Ende: Täme, Kawam,
Bitur, Gogodala
Background: SNG region
(cf. Evans et al. 2018)
❖ Very diverse: multiple
unrelated phyla

❖ High degree of egalitarian

multilingualism
(Haudricourt 1961; François
2012)

❖ Subsistence agriculture
+ hunting

❖ Small settlement groups

(tens – low 100’s
until 1950s-1960s)
 Idi and Ende
Idi Ende
Pahoturi River family
~1600 speakers in 6 settlements ~1000 speakers in 2 settlements
Four nasal phonemes: m n ɲ ŋ
Prenasalisation of stops (with variation too)

❖ Word-finally, nasals are often deleted…

❖ Where does it happen? Which lexical items? What part of
the utterance?
❖ Who does this?
❖ Can we find a pattern?
❖ For this talk: focusing on verbs
 Idi
Independence day procession in Dimsisi village, 2014
 Verbal inflection (cf. Gast 2013; 2014)
❖ Suffix -(V)n: very frequent
❖ 1|3sg subject in remote past, recent past; present tense
auxiliary
❖ 3sg|2nsg subject in future
❖ underspecified (i.e. occurring with most
person/number values of subject) in intransitive
prefixing verbs, some copulas

❖ Overall, verb-final /n/ is dropped about 12% of the

time
 Examples
❖Remote past lexical (suffixing) verb

nyonggo=a dämä be-a\nggas/en

path=CORE there 3sgU.REMPST-AUG-make-1|3sgA
‘He made a road there.’

❖ Recent past lexical (suffixing) verb

Gwadang ydi da n-a\nggas/an

PN what DEM RECPST-AUG-make-1|3sgA.RECPST
‘What did Gwadang do (just now)?’
 Examples
❖ Remote past prefixing verb

Emmy bi d-ya\r/ge-n
Emmy 1nsg.N O M REMPST-nsgU-go-nplS>plO-1|3sgA

äl-äwä
river-A L L
‘Emmy and us went to the river.’

❖ Present progressive transitive

yau yndhpä y\r/an

NEG see 3sgU-A U X -1|3sgA.R E C P S T
‘I don’t see him.’
 Examples
❖ Present progressive intransitive

Idi yeka yeka w\l/an

Idi language speak INTR-AUX-1|3sgA.RECPST
‘I am speaking Idi.’

❖ Future lexical (suffixing) verb

oil=a b-a\nggas/en
oil=CORE FUT-AUG-make-3sgA
‘(S)he will make oil (with the coconuts).’
 Examples: wlan 1|3SG
INTR AUX
1. Senior male, without final N deletion

2. Senior male, with final N deletion

3. Middle-aged female, without final N

deletion

4. Middle-aged female, with final N deletion

 Data
❖ Corpus of ~ 50,000 words, naturalistic speech
❖ ‘Coconut interviews’, procedurals, personal narratives, legends

❖ After data cleanup: 3,284 tokens of verbs ending in /n/

❖ Coded for
❖ Nasal-drop (y or n)
❖ # of syllables (2, 3, 4+)
❖ Preceding segment (low/mid/high full vowel; reduced vowel)
❖ Root and token frequency (high, middle, low)
❖ Following segment (vowel, consonant, pause)
❖ TAM value (remote past, recent past, present, future)
❖ Verb class (lexical, auxiliary, copula, prefixing)
❖ Subject person/number and expression (NP, pro, zero)
 Data
❖ Disregarded cases e.g.:
❖ Verbs in utterance-initial position: this is rare as Idi has
basic SOV order, and copulas/auxiliaries never occur
in this position
❖ The verb ibäny ‘plant’
❖ 2nsg.F U T inflections: categorical use of /n/, no elision
 Speakers
~ 20-40 y/o ~ 40-60 y/o ~ 60+ y/o Total
Female 6 4 6 16
Male 8 9 6 23
Total 14 13 12 39
 Speakers
❖ Age groups roughly correspond to ‘generations’:
parents, grandparents, great-grandparents (very few
young unmarried speakers in sample)

❖ Speakers were also coded for

❖ Clan affiliation
❖ Current place of residence
❖ Language of father/mother/spouse (if
known/applicable)

❖ Only data from speakers that had more than 30 tokens

of verbs ending in /n/ were included
Classification tree

(see e.g. Tagliamonte & Baayen 2012)

Age effect
 TAM
20-40 yo 40-60 yo 60+ yo Total
Future 0% 4% 10% 7%
Present 45% 61% 66% 60%
Recent past 0% 5% 16% 9%
Remote past 4% 2% 9% 5%
Total 8% 9% 17% 12%
 Following Segment
20-40 yo 40-60 yo 60+ yo Total
C 10% 13% 21% 15%
P 8% 7% 16% 11%
V 5% 3% 3% 4%
Total 8% 9% 17% 12%
 Logistic regression analysis
❖ Independent factors included
❖ TAM
❖ Following Segment
❖ Verb class
❖ Age group
❖ Sex

❖ Speaker and word were included as random effects

(Johnson 2009)
 Results
Df Sum_sq F p
Fol_Seg 2 30.033 15.0166 < 0.00001 ***
Sex 1 0.367 0.3673 0.544522 n.s.
Age_Group 2 7.601 3.8006 0.022456 *
TAM 3 92.409 30.8028 < 0.00001 ***
V_class 3 2.123 0.7077 0.547327 n.s.
 Conclusions
❖ TAM is single most important predictor of nasal elision: in
present, /n/ is elided in almost 60% of cases

❖ In the other tenses, following segment is a strong predictor:

/n/ is elided more often when the following segment is a
consonant or pause, as opposed to a vowel

❖ Age is a significant social factor: 60+ people show a

tendency to drop the nasal

❖ Women show a slightly higher tendency to drop the nasal

than men across all age groups (n.s.)
 Ende
Letae Jerry beating sago in Limol village, 2018
 Data
❖ Conducted 73 interviews in Limol village in 2018

❖ Average interview:
❖ 18.3 minutes
❖ 127 /n/ final tokens

❖ Corpus of ~ 86,000 words (all sociolinguistic

questionnaire interviews)

❖ 9,120 tokens ending in /n/

 Speakers
~ 20-40 y/o ~ 40-60 y/o ~ 60+ y/o Total
Female 12 12 8 32
Male 17 11 8 36
Total 29 23 16 68
*5 speakers under 18 were not included to provide a better comparison with Idi
for this presentation
 Speakers
❖ Age groups match Dineke Schokkin’s study

❖ Speakers were also coded for

❖ Clan affiliation
❖ Hometown
❖ Language of father/mother/spouse
 Data
❖ Selected most frequent lemma dan ‘sing. sub. pres.
copula’ (N = 2134)
 Uses of dan
❖ Two general types of copular uses

❖ With descriptive arguments

❖ Modifier: ‘He is big.’
❖ Nominal: ‘He is a big man.’
❖ Locational: ‘He is in Limol.’
❖ Dummy: ‘He is like this.’
Copulas with modifiers
 Syntactic construction
❖ With non-descriptive arguments
❖ Knowledge: ‘My knowledge is writing.’ = ‘I know how
to write.’
❖ Can: ‘I am good I write.’ = ‘I can write.’
❖ Possessive: ‘My children are not.’ = ‘I don’t have
children.’
❖ Purposive: ‘I am for hunting.’ = ‘I will go hunting.’
Copulas in knowledge constructions
 Data
❖ Selected most frequent lemma dan ‘sing. sub. pres.
copula’ (N = 2134)

❖ Three variants: dan ~ da ~ danän

❖ Coded for
❖ Final nasal (0, n, nän)

❖ Following segment (vowel within 0.4s, consonant

within 0.4s, pause (#), intonation break(##))
❖ Syntactic construction
Classification Tree
Classification Tree
(without danän tokens)
 Results
❖ When the innovative, yet rare, danän variable is removed,
the non-realization of /n/ can be predicted by linguistic
variables alone: following segment (C or ##; p<0.001) and
construction type (non-descriptive; p<0.001).

❖ The non-realization of /n/ in the present copula dan

appears to be stable across the community from this
apparent time sample.

❖ The dan token, however, is perhaps most comparable to the

present tense auxiliary tokens in Dineke’s study of Idi,
which also shows community stability and very high rates
of n-dropping.
 Results
❖ The presence of the third variable, danän, can be
predicted by social variables: age (18-40; p<0.001) and
sex (female; p<0.001).

❖ BUT very low tokens (N=24)

❖ The sequence -än is homophonous with the 3rd

singular subject agreement suffix in non-copular verbs.

❖ 91% of the time it accompanies a descriptive

argument.

❖ Also appears on copulas of other types.

 Next Steps
❖ Expand Ende dataset to include non-present tense
verbs.

❖ Expand Ende dataset to include more copulas,

including those with a third danän type variable.

❖ Look at cognate Idi copula da ~ dand (not n-final, but

also showing variable realisation)
 Discussion
❖ In Idi, the oldest speakers are leading in the use of the
/n/-less form.

❖ In Ende, the youngest women are leading in the use of

the danän form.

❖ How can results of WEIRD variation studies inform

our understanding of Idi and Ende variation?

❖ Can we determine whether these are cases of age-

gradation or a change in progress?
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 Acknowledgements
❖ Data collection

Puli Ämädu, Simon Bagi, Christian Döhler, Birke Eka, Nick Evans,
Carls Gana, Kaune Gana, Masa Gegera, Kmonde Gigu, Magham Greh,
Judy James, Qandro Kaeko, Tobias Maletz, Titi Masa, Sawe Masro,
Paul Mikuku, Bess Purge

❖ Data analysis

Danielle Barth, Kate Lindsey, Mark Ellison, Eri Kashima, Catherine

Travis & other members of the Wellsprings team

❖ Funding

ARC Laureate project ‘The Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity’