Browse

This book deals with the phenomenon of vowel harmony, a phonological process whereby all the vowels in a word are required to share a specific phonological property, such as front or back articulation. Vowel harmony occurs in the majority of languages of the world, though only in very few European languages, and has been a central concern in phonological theory for many years. In this volume, Harry van der Hulst puts forward a new theory of vowel harmony, which accounts for the patterns of and exceptions to this phenomenon in the widest range of languages ever considered. The book begins with an overview of the general causes of asymmetries in vowel harmony systems. The two following chapters provide a detailed account of a new theory of vowel harmony based on unary elements and licensing, which is embedded in a general dependency-based theory of phonological structure. In the remaining chapters, this theory is applied to a variety of vowel harmony phenomena from typologically diverse languages, including palatal harmony in languages such as Finnish and Hungarian, labial harmony in Turkic languages, and tongue root systems in Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Tungusic languages.

The essays in this volume address foundational questions in phonology that cut across different schools of thought within the discipline. The theme of modularity runs through them all, however, and these essays demonstrate the benefits of the modular approach to phonology, either investigating interactions among distinct modules or developing specific aspects of representation within a particular module. Although the contributors take divergent views on a range of issues, they agree on the importance of representations and questions of modularity in phonology. Their essays address the status of phonological features, syllable theory, metrical structure, the architecture of the phonological component, and interaction among components of phonology. In the early 1990s the rise of Optimality Theory—which suggested that pure computation would solve the problems of representations and modularity—eclipsed the centrality of these issues for phonology. This book offers a coherent view of phonology that is not based on Optimality Theory. The chapters demonstrate that computation and representation are inherently linked; they do not deny Optimality Theory, but attempt to move the field of phonology beyond it.

Syntactic contrasts, the systems of grammatical oppositions that exist within individual languages, are typically formally encoded in terms of features. The nature of syntactic contrast is tied to a fundamental question in generative syntactic theory: What is universal in syntax (and in language more generally), and what is variable? This volume explores the dual role of features, on the one hand defining a set of paradigmatic contrasts, and other the other hand acting as the building blocks of syntactic structures and the drivers of syntactic operations. In both roles, features are increasingly seen as the locus of parametric variation. The identification of parameters with features has opened up new possibilities for exploring connections between the morphological system of a language and its syntax, and suggests a new role for featural contrast in syntactic theory. The papers collected here represent a diversity of topics, perspectives, and concerns, but are united by an interest in morphosyntactic representations, and in the formal encoding of syntactic contrasts.

This book is about the nature of expression in speech. It is a comprehensive exploration of how such expression is produced and understood, and of how the emotional content of spoken words may be analysed, modelled, tested, and synthesized. Listeners can interpret tone-of-voice, assess emotional pitch, and effortlessly detect the finest modulations of speaker attitude; yet these processes present almost intractable difficulties to the researchers seeking to identify and understand them. In seeking to explain the production and perception of emotive content, the book reviews the potential of biological and cognitive models. It examines how the features that make up the speech production and perception systems have been studied by biologists, psychologists, and linguists, and assesses how far biological, behavioural, and linguistic models generate hypotheses that provide insights into the nature of expressive speech.

This book essentially argues for the importance of word frequency as a factor in the analysis and explanation of language structure. In other words, the roles of words and other linguistic phenomena such as morphology, phonology, and syntax are highly influenced by low, medium, or high frequency with which they occur. The book includes three decades of influential research in one thematic source. It provides an introductory overview that traces the development of thinking on this important subject. The discussion covers word frequency in lexical diffusion, morphophonemics, lexical and morphological conditioning of alternations using Spanish verbs as example, rules and schemas in the development and use of the English past tense, morphological classes as natural categories, regular morphology and lexicon, sequentiality as the basis of constituent structure, and mechanisms of change in grammaticization.

An investigation of the criteria needed to determine sameness and difference in the classification of items of phonological relevance. Reliance on phonetic substance and meaningful contrast as the criteria for phonological analysis is insufficient; an appeal to the function of the items to be classified is also necessary in many cases. A declarative account of phonology is proposed which is nonsegmental and polysystemic; derivation is excluded from the grammar. What counts as the same phonological item is investigated in a number of phenomena in different languages. Separate chapters are devoted to the issues of biuniqueness and monosystemicity, segmentation, and phonetic implementation and abstractness; a final chapter deals with panlectal grammars.

This book presents a phenomenon-oriented survey of the ways in which phonology and morphology interact, including ways in which morphology, i.e. word formation, demonstrates sensitivity to phonological information and in which phonological patterns can be sensitive to morphology. Chapters focus on morphologically conditioned phonology, process morphology, prosodic templates, reduplication, infixation, phonology-morphology interleaving effects, prosodic-morphological mismatches, ineffability and other cases in which phonology interferes with morphology, and paradigmatic effects of morphology on phonology, and vice versa. The overview points out theoretical issues on which particular phenomena bear. These include the debate over item-based vs. realizational approaches to morphology, the question of whether cyclic effects can be subsumed under paradigmatic effects, whether reduplication is phonological copying or morphological doubling, whether infixation and suppletive allomorphy are phonologically optimizing, and more. The book is intended to be used in graduate or advanced undergraduate courses or to have as a reference for those pursuing individual topics in the phonology-morphology interface. The overarching aim of the book is to bring together, and connect in as many ways as possible, the large and diverse set of topics that fall under the umbrella of the phonology-morphology interface.

Speakers can modulate the meaning and effects of their utterances by changing the location of stress or of pauses, and by choosing the melody of their sentences—jointly referred to as Information Structure. Although these factors often do not change the literal meaning of what is said, tools and models to describe these more elusive aspects of linguistic meaning have, in recent years, been developed in formal semantics and pragmatics. This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody—stress, phrasing, and melody—and interpretation—felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis. It presents the main phenomena involved, and introduces the details of current formal analyses of prosodic structure, relevant aspects of discourse structure, intonational meaning, and, most importantly, the relations between them. Büring explains and compares the most influential theories in these areas, and outlines the questions that remain open for future research.

This book offers a comprehensive description of the prosody of nine Romance languages (Catalan, French, Friulian, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish) which takes into account internal dialectal variation. The prosodic analysis of all nine languages has been couched in a common framework, the Autosegmental Metrical framework of intonational phonology and the ToBI transcription system, and has been carried out by groups of well-known experts on the prosody of these languages. One of the two noteworthy aspects of the book is the common methodology used in each of the chapters, which was based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire. The elicited DCT data allow for an analysis of how intonation patterns work together with other grammatical means (syntactic constructions, discourse particles) in the linguistic marking of a varied set of sentence-types and pragmatic meanings across Romance languages. The second important aspect of the book is the fact that the ToBI prosodic systems and annotations proposed for each language are based both on a phonological analysis of the target language and on the shared goal of using ToBI analyses that are comparable across Romance languages.

This book offers a detailed examination of morphology and phonology from a phase-cyclic point of view (that is, one that takes into account recent developments in Distributed Morphology and the Minimalist program) and a detailed treatment of allomorphy, a phenomenon that is central to understanding how the grammar of human language works. In addition to making new theoretical proposals about morphology and phonology in terms of a cyclic theory, it addresses a schism in the field between phonological theories such as Optimality Theory and other (mostly syntactic) theories such as those associated with the Minimalist program. The book presents sustained empirical arguments that the Localist view of grammar associated with the Minimalist program (and Distributed Morphology in particular) is correct, and that the Globalism espoused by many forms of Optimality Theory is incorrect. In the “derivational versus nonderivational” debate in linguistic theory, its arguments come down squarely on the derivational side. Determining how to make empirical comparisons between such large positions and the different frameworks that embody them is at the heart of the book. The book argues that patterns of allomorphy implicate general questions about locality and specific questions about the manner in which (morpho)syntax relates to (morpho)phonology. Allomorphy thus provides a crucial test case for comparing Localist and Globalist approaches to grammar.

This book investigates the phenomenon of Morphological Length-Manipulation: processes of segment lengthening, shortening, deletion, and insertion that cannot be explained by phonological means but crucially rely on morpho-syntactic information. A unified theoretical account of these phenomena is presented and it is argued that Morphological Length-Manipulation is best analysed inside the framework termed ‘Prosodically Defective Morphemes’: if all possible Prosodically Defective Morpheme representations and their potential effects for the resulting surface structure are taken into account, instances of length-manipulating non-concatenative morphology and length-manipulating morpheme-specific phonology are predicted. The argumentation in this book is hence in line with the general claim that all morphology results from combination and that non-concatenative exponents are epiphenomenal and arise from affixation of autosegmental elements. Although this position has been defended various times for specific phenomena, it has rarely been discussed against the background of a broad typological survey. In contrast to most existing claims, the argumentation in this book is based on a representative data set for attested morphological length-manipulating patterns in the languages of the world that serves as basis for the theoretical arguments. It is argued that alternative accounts suffer from severe under- and overgeneration problems if they are tested against the full range of attested phenomena.

Exponence is the mapping of morphosyntactic structure to phonological representations, a research area which is not only the traditional bone of contention between phonology and morphology, but also approached in fundamentally diverse ways in different theoretical frameworks such as Optimality Theory and Distributed Morphology: by morphological rules carrying out complex phonological operations, highly abstract morphophonological representations, and/or by phonological constraints which are sensitive to morphological information. This volume presents a synopsis of the state-of-the-art in research on exponence, based on a novel conception: Every chapter systematically discusses a specific aspect of exponence from the point of view of current theoretical morphology, but also from a theoretical phonology perspective. Topics include nonconcatenative morphology, allomorphy, iconicity, dissimilation and truncation processes. Two detailed chapters formulate a new coherent research program for exponence which integrates the central insights of the last decades and provides important new challenges for years to come.

The essays in this volume address a core question about the structure of linguistic systems: how much access do grammatical components (syntax, morphology, and phonology) have to each other? Each essay argues in favor of a particular view of the interaction of these components. Each sheds light on the nature of locality domains for allomorph selection, the morphosyntactic properties of the targets of phonological exponence, and adjudicating between the competing theories of morphosyntax-phonology interaction. This volume incorporates insights from recent theoretical developments (e.g., Optimality Theory, Distributed Morphology) and insights made available to us by contemporary empirical methodologies (field work, experimental and corpus-based quantitative work).

This book presents a cross-linguistic study of the phenomenon of infixation, typically associated in English with words like nullim-bloody-possiblenull, and found in all the world's major linguistic families. Infixation is a central puzzle in prosodic morphology: the book explores its prosodic, phonological, and morphological characteristics; considers its diverse functions, and formulates a general theory to explain the rules and constraints by which it is governed. The book examines 154 infixation patterns from over a hundred languages, including examples from Asia, Europe, Africa, New Guinea, and South America. It compares the formal properties of different kinds of infix, explores the range of diachronic pathways that lead to them, and considers the processes by which they are acquired in first language learning. A central argument of the book concerns the idea that the typological tendencies of language may be traced back to its origins and to the mechanisms of language transmission. The book thus combines the history of infixation with an exploration of the role diachronic and functional factors play in synchronic argumentation: it is an exemplary instance of the holistic approach to linguistic explanation.

This volume showcases the current state of the art in phonologization research, bringing together work by leading scholars in sound change research from different disciplinary and scholarly traditions. The book investigates the progression of sound change from the perspectives of speech perception, speech production, phonology, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, computer science, statistics, and social and cognitive psychology. This volume highlights the fruitfulness of collaborative efforts among phonologists with specialists from neighboring disciplines seeking unified theoretical explanations for the origins of sound patterns in language, as well as seeking to move toward a new and improved synthesis of synchronic and diachronic phonology.

The point of departure of this book is the fundamental observation that actual conversations tend to consist of loosely connected, compact, and meaningful chunks built on a noun phrase, rather than fully fledged sentences. Therefore, after the treatment of elementary matters such as the Turkish alphabet and pronunciation in part I, the main points of part II are the structure of noun phrases and their function in nominal, existential, and verbal sentences, while part III presents their adjuncts and modifiers. The verbal system is extensively discussed in part IV, and in part V on sentence structure the grammatical phenomena presented so far are wrapped up. The first five parts of the book, taken together, provide for all-round operational knowledge of Turkish on a basic level. Part VI deals with the ways in which complex words are constructed, and constitutes a bridge to the advanced matter treated in parts VII and VIII. These latter parts deal with advanced topics such as relative clauses, subordination, embedded clauses, clausal complements, and the finer points of the verbal system. An important advantage of this book is its revealing new content: the section on syllable structure explains how loanwords adapt to Turkish; other topics include: the use of pronouns in invectives; verbal objects classified in terms of case marking; extensive treatment of the optative (highly relevant in day-to-day conversation); recursion and lexicalization in compounds; stacking of passives; the Başı-Bozuk and Focus-Locus constructions; relativization on possessive, dative, locative, and ablative objects, instrumentals and adverbial adjuncts; pseudo-relative clauses; typology of clausal complements; periphrastic constructions and double negation.

This monograph presents a thorough investigation of the main historical and present-day variation and change patterns undergone by palatal sounds in the Romance languages. By relying on phonetic and phonological information to motivate a formal account of palatal sound change, the analyses proposed in this book offer a principled, constraint-based explanation for the evolution of palatals in the Romance-speaking world. It provides a robust and up-to-date literature review on the subject, taking into consideration not only the viewpoints and data from diachronic research, but also the results from various phonetic, phonological, dialectal, and comprehensive studies. By taking into account the role of phonetic information in the shaping of phonological patterns, this book approaches sound change from its inception during the speaker-listener interaction and formalizes it as the difference in constraint ranking between the grammar of the speaker and that of the listener-turned-speaker. This perspective is intended to model how and why similar change events may take place in different varieties and/or the same language across periods of time.

This book presents insights on the phonology-morphology interface. It discusses a wide range of central theoretical issues, including the role of paradigms in synchronic grammars, and does so in the context of a wide variety of languages including several non-Indo-European languages. Paradigm uniformity has a long tradition in pre-generative linguistics but until recently played a minor role in theoretical phonology. Optimality Theory has drawn renewed attention to paradigmatic effects, formalized by constraints comparing the surface pronunciation of morphologically related words. The ten chapters in this book illustrate how a wide range of exceptions to regular phonological processes can be explained in this fashion. The chapters address such important theoretical questions as: do paradigms have a morphological base? If so, how is it defined? Why do paradigmatic effects hold for only certain subsets of words? In which areas of the grammar are paradigmatic effects likely to be found? The book discusses new data from the synchronic grammars of a wide variety of unrelated languages, including: Modern Hebrew, Chimwiini and Jita (Bantu), Halkomelem (Salish), Hungarian, and Arabic.

The present study sheds light on the phonetic causes of sound change and the intermediate stages of the diachronic pathways by studying the palatalization and assibilation of velar stops (referred to commonly as ‘velar softening’, as exemplified by the replacement of Latin /ˈkɛntʊ/ by Tuscan Italian [ˈtʃɛnto] ‘one hundred’), and of labial stops and labiodental fricatives (also known as’ labial softening’, as in the case of the dialectal variant [ˈtʃatɾə] of /ˈpjatɾə/ ‘stone’ in Romanian dialects). To a lesser extent, it also deals with the palatalization and affrication of dentoalveolar stops. The book supports an articulation-based account of those sound-change processes, and holds that, for the most part, the corresponding affricate and fricative outcomes have been issued from intermediate (alveolo)palatal-stop realizations differing in closure fronting degree. Special attention is given to the one-to-many relationship between the input and output consonantal realizations, to the acoustic cues which contribute to the implementation of these sound changes, and to those positional and contextual conditions in which those changes are prone to operate most feasibly. Different sources of evidence are taken into consideration: descriptive data from, for example, Bantu studies and linguistic atlases of Romanian dialects in the case of labial softening; articulatory and acoustic data for velar and (alveolo)palatal stops and front lingual affricates; perceptual results from phoneme identification tests. The universal character of the claims being made derives from the fact that the dialectal material, and to some extent the experimental material as well, belong to a wide range of languages from not only Europe but also all the other continents.

The development of phonetic notation from writing systems, and of phonetic transcription as a special mode of writing, are placed within the history of phonetics and within a theoretical framework which distinguishes phonetic transcription from spelling and transliteration, and emphasizes the heavy dependence of phonetic notation and transcription on phonetic theory. Different notation systems and different kinds of transcription are described, and an account is offered of how phonetic symbols work to denote theoretical categories on the one hand, and to represent spoken language data on the other. A critical discussion of the notion of ‘segment’ concludes that it is a legitimate unit of phonetic perception and analysis despite much scepticism in the phonetics and phonological literature. Arguments are put for the value of auditory-perceptual analysis and impressionistic phonetic transcription, and also for regarding the categories of general phonetic theory as neutral with respect to production, transmission and perception despite the overwhelmingly articulatory terminology. The relationship between transcription and instrumental records is also examined. A brief survey of various uses of phonetic transcription concludes the book. There is a short glossary of technical terms, and an Appendix containing the most recently updated IPA, ExtIPA, VoQS and IPA Braille charts, plus an ‘elaborated’ IPA chart.