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Interior Reduplication in the St’at’imcets Diminuitive



Author(s)

Isobel Wrinch

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DOI:10.17265/2160-6579/2025.06.001

University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

The Lillooet language, or St’at’imcets, is an endangered interior Salish language of the Northern family, that is spoken by the St’at’imc people in southern BC. The language is mutually intelligible to other Northern family Salish languages, with differences arising in certain lexical items (van Eijk, 1997). The focus of this paper is on the single consonant interior reduplication process in the St’at’imcets diminutive. The comprehensive grammar by Jan van Eijk (1997) describes the patterns that arise from interior reduplication without giving an analysis on what drives this particular affixation. Examples of this affix mainly demonstrate reduplication of a single consonant, or a “C-reduplication pattern”, such as in [ʔáma] “good” + DIM = [ʔáʔma] “cute, pretty” and [qíqəlʼ] “weak” + DIM = [qə́qqəlʼ] “rather weak”. Some forms include a vowel in the reduplicant, such as in [sqláw’] “beaver” + DIM = [sqlə́ləw’] “little beaver”. St’ati’mcets C-reduplication copies the consonant preceding the most prominent peak, or the primary stressed vowel in the prosodic word. Using an Optimality Theory (OT) approach, a general ranking was discovered using syllabification constraints alongside shape and position constraints. The position of the infixation is generated through maintaining base-edge faithfulness (Kurisu & Sanders, 1999) and motivating the reduplicant to go as far left as possible without reduplicating left of the stressed vowel. The shape of the reduplicant is driven by the satisfaction of the morphological requirements, and the St’at’imcets syllable template. Vowel epenthesis of [ə] appears to co-occur with consonant reduplication to prevent violations of the syllable template when complex codas greater than three segments would else be formed (*CCC), or if the resulting complex coda is in violation of the sonority sequencing principle (SSP). Exceptions to the maximum limit of two segments in an onset/coda are due to the high ranking of Max-IO, causing input faithfulness. Other phonological phenomena appear to be triggered by the St’at’imcets C-reduplication, such as the alternation in base vowel quality and resonant glottalization. Base vowel quality changes so far have been unpredictable; however, the epenthesized vowel is always predictable ([ə]). The glottalization of resonants has a somewhat predictable pattern. Insight to these phenomena is currently outside of the research question but may be considered for future research.

St’at’imcets, Optimality Theory, infixation, Salish languages, C-reduplication