Affective coronal alternations in Mapudungun: Sound symbolism, change, and morpho-phonological structure

Abstract This paper examines a series of consonantal alternations conveying ‘affective’ meanings in the South American language Mapudungun (Catrileo 1986, 2010, 2022). The processes target the rich four-place coronal inventory of the language by shifting consonants in root morphemes to palatal or dental articulations. The palatalisations are cross-linguistically common in implying small size, tenderness, closeness, and politeness (e.g. [naʐki] ‘cat’ [ɲaʃki] ‘kitty’); however, the effects of dentalisation are more unexpected, implying distance, abruptness, sarcasm, and rudeness (e.g. [naʐki] ‘cat’ [n̪aθki] ‘damned cat’). While speakers evidently seem to assign sound symbolic value to the alternations, the patterns do not align neatly with cross-linguistically expected ‘synaesthetic’ correspondences, particularly to do with size symbolism and acoustic frequency (Ohala 1984, 1994). Based on historical metalinguistic commentary and corpus data, I argue that the Mapudungun alternations are long-established in the language, showing a variety of lexicalised forms, and being deeply grammatically entrenched both in their semantico-pragmatic implications and their morpho-phonological structure. As such, any sound-symbolic patterns are fundamentally subordinate to the grammatical architecture. I propose that a more parsimonious analysis of the patterns is an autosegmental one, where floating evaluative morphemes (diminutives and augmentatives) spread [ distributed ] and [ anterior ] feature nodes to the target coronal consonants, along with their language-specific pragmatics.