09 Nov 2004

Bert Remijsen (University of Leiden) & Leoma Gilley (University of Khartoum)

Dinka is a Nilotic language spoken in Southern Sudan. Most Dinka words have the segmental structure CVC (Andersen 1987). A range of inflections on nouns and verbs are encoded by prosodic contrasts in the stem. In this way, Dinka employs voice quality (breathy vs. modal), lexical tone, and vowel length in a contrastive manner. There is, however, an additional prosodic contrast of which the nature remains unclear. This contrast has been analyzed as an additional (third) level of vowel length by Andersen (1987), and as lexical stress by Gilley (forthc.).

Our acoustic study suggests that this contrast is one of 'complementary quantity' (Elert 1964). This means that vowels can be long or short relative to the duration of the following coda. The phenomenon is well known from Norwegian and Swedish. The Dinka case is very interesting, because here the complementary quantity contrast is independent of a vowel length contrast. That is, both short and long vowels additionally vary in length as a proportion of the overall rhyme duration. Our alternative analysis goes some way towards explaining previous interpretations of the phenomenon by Andersen (vowel length) and Gilley (stress). That is, the complementary quantity contrast is encoded primarily by segmental duration, just as a vowel length contrast would be, and by vowel quality, which is an established correlate of lexical stress in English and several other languages.

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