Some Hiaki ‘Echo Vowels’ Result from a Floating Glottal Feature

Hiaki (ISO639-3 yaq, Tara-Cahitic, Uto-Aztecan) has a poorly understood system of prosodic phonology, in which pitch accent, vowel length, and syllable structure interact. One process which is ubiquitous in the language but has not been extensively studied involves the appearance of ‘echo vowels’ (Dedrick and Casad 1999:28-29). This term is used to describe apparent V1ʔV1 sequences which appear in some lexically and morphologically conditioned contexts. Previous descriptions of echo vowels in Hiaki have appealed to phonotactic and metrical constraints on [ʔ.C] clusters that trigger the insertion of a copied (‘echo’) vowel (Dedrick and Casad 1999: 28-29). However, Hiaki has another robust method of breaking up illegal clusters using an epenthetic [i]. Instead, we propose that the [ʔ] seen in ‘echo’ V1ʔV1 sequences is not a glottal consonant, but a glottal feature that is attached to certain vowels. Depending on its phonological environment, this feature surfaces as either a glottal onset (before a vowel) or a preglottalized vowel (before a consonant-initial syllable).