On glottal stops and reduplication in Chukchi

The paper examines two interrelated topics from Chukchi phonetics: the status of the glottal stop as a segment or prosody and the rules for stem doubling in incomplete reduplications that form the nominative singular. We create a database comprising 181 inflectional reduplications. Reduplications containing a glottal stop and therefore located “at the junction” of these two topics are discussed in detail. We demonstrate that, contrary to the observations of previous researchers, the behavior of the glottal stop in reduplications cannot serve as an argument in favor of its prosodic analysis. This allows us to consider the segmental analysis of the Chukchi glottal stop as the most plausible. We use the database to refine the rule for simplification of final consonant clusters. We identify a number of reduplications which demonstrate that cluster resolution can preserve not only the first but also the second consonant of the cluster and offer an explanation accounting for the distribution of the two resolution options, which relies on more general properties of Chukchi phonotactics constraining the compatibility of phonemes with different places of articulation. The paper also makes observations on the synchronic and historical properties of specific Chukchi lexemes, thus contributing to the Proto-Chukchi-Koryak reconstruction.