Enlightened Romanticism: Mary Gartside’s colour theory in the age of Moses Harris, Goethe and George Field

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the work of Mary Gartside, a British female colour theorist, active in London between 1781 and 1808. She published three books between 1805 and 1808. In chronological and intellectual terms Gartside can cautiously be regarded an exemplary link between Moses Harris, who published a short but important theory of colour in the second half of the eighteenth century, and J.W. von Goethe’s highly influential Zur Farbenlehre, published in Germany in 1810. Gartside’s colour theory was published privately under the disguise of a traditional water colouring manual, illustrated with stunning abstract colour blots (see example above). Until well into the twentieth century, she remained the only woman known to have published a theory of colour. In contrast to Goethe and other colour theorists in the late 18th and early 19th century Gartside was less inclined to follow the anti-Newtonian attitudes of the Romantic movement

A preliminary bibliography on focus

[I]n its present form, the bibliography contains approximately 1100 entries. Bibliographical work is never complete, and the present one is still modest in a number of respects. It is not annotated, and it still contains a lot of mistakes and inconsistencies. It has nevertheless reached a stage which justifies considering the possibility of making it available to the public. The first step towards this is its pre-publication in the form of this working paper. […] The bibliography is less complete for earlier years. For works before 1970, the bibliographies of Firbas and Golkova 1975 and Tyl 1970 may be consulted, which have not been included here

Heritage Languages and Their Speakers: Opportunities and Challenges for Linguistics

In this paper, we bring to the attention of the linguistic community recent research on heritage languages. Shifting linguistic attention from the model of a monolingual speaker to the model of a multilingual speaker is important for the advancement of our understanding of the language faculty. Native speaker competence is typically the result of normal first language acquisition in an environment where the native language is dominant in various contexts, and learners have extensive and continuous exposure to it and opportunities to use it. Heritage speakers present a different case: they are bilingual speakers of an ethnic or immigrant minority language, whose first language often does not reach native-like attainment in adulthood. We propose a set of connections between heritage language studies and theory construction, underscoring the potential that this population offers for linguistic research. We examine several important grammatical phenomena from the standpoint of their representation in heritage languages, including case, aspect, and other interface phenomena. We discuss how the questions raised by data from heritage speakers could fruitfully shed light on current debates about how language works and how it is acquired under different conditions. We end with a consideration of the potential competing factors that shape a heritage language system in adulthood.Linguistic

Reductio ad discrimen: Where features come from

This paper addresses two fundamental questions about the nature of formal features in phonology and morphosyntax: what is their expressive power, and where do they come from? To answer these questions, we begin with the most restrictive possible hypothesis (all features are privative, and are wholly dictated by Universal Grammar, with no room for cross-linguistic variation), and examine the extent to which empirical evidence from a variety of languages compels a retreat from this position. We argue that there is little to be gained by positing a universal set of specific features, and propose instead that the crucial contribution of UG is the language learner's ability to construct features by identifying correlations between contrasts at different levels of linguistic structure. This view resonates with current research on how the interaction between UG and external 'third factors' shapes the structure of language, while at the same time harking back to the Saussurean notion that contrast is the central function of linguistic representations

Predictions on markedness and feature resilience in loanword adaptation

Normalement, un emprunt est adapté afin que ses éléments étrangers s’intègrent au système phonologique de la langue emprunteuse. Certains auteurs (cf. Miao 2005; Steriade 2001b, 2009) ont soutenu que, lors de l’adaptation d’une consonne, les traits de manière d’articulation sont plus résistants au changement que les traits laryngaux (ex. : le voisement) ou que ceux de place. Mes résultats montrent cependant que les traits de manière (ex. : [±continu]) sont impliqués dans les adaptations consonantiques aussi fréquemment que les autres traits (ex. [±voisé] et [±antérieur]). Par exemple, le /Z/ français est illicite à l’initiale en anglais. Les options d’adaptation incluent /Z/ → [z] (changement de place), /Z/ → [S] (changement de voisement) et /Z/ → [dZ] (changement de manière). Contrairement aux prédictions des auteurs précités, l’adaptation primaire en anglais est /Z/ → [dZ], avec changement de manière (ex. français [Zelatin] gélatine → anglais [dZElœtIn]). Plutôt qu’une résistance des traits de manière, les adaptations étudiées dans ma thèse font ressortir une nette tendance à la simplification. Mon hypothèse est que les langues adaptent les consonnes étrangères en en éliminant les complexités. Donc un changement impliquant l’élimination plutôt que l’insertion d’un trait marqué sera préféré. Ma thèse innove aussi en montrant qu’une consonne est le plus souvent importée lorsque sa stratégie d’adaptation primaire implique l’insertion d’un trait marqué. Les taux d’importation sont systématiquement élevés pour les consonnes dont l’adaptation impliquerait l’insertion d’un tel trait (ici [+continu] ou [+voisé]). Par exemple, /dZ/ en anglais, lorsque adapté, devient /Z/ en français après l’insertion de [+continu]; cependant, l’importation de /dZ/ est de loin préférée à son adaptation (89%). En comparaison, /dZ/ est rarement importé (10%) en germano-pennsylvanien (GP) parce que l’adaptation de /dZ/ à [tS] (élision du trait marqué [+voisé]) est disponible, contrairement au cas du français. Cependant, le /t/ anglais à l’initiale, lui, est majoritairement importé (74%) en GP parce que son adaptation en /d/ impliquerait l’insertion du trait marqué [+voisé]. Ma thèse permet non seulement de mieux cerner la direction des adaptations, mais repère aussi ce qui favorise fortement les importations sur la base d’une notion déjà établie en phonologie : la marque.A loanword is normally adapted to fit its foreign elements to the phonological system of the borrowing language (L1). Recently, some authors (e.g. Miao 2005; Steriade 2001b, 2009) have proposed that during the adaptation process of a second language (L2) consonant, manner features are more resistant to change than are non-manner features. A careful study of my data indicate that manner features (e.g. [±continuant]) are as likely to be involved in the adaptation process as are non-manner [±voice] and [±anterior]. For example, French /Z/ is usually not tolerated word-initially in English. Adaptation options include /Z/ → [z] (change of place), /Z/ → [S] (change of voicing) and /Z/ → [dZ] (change of manner). The primary adaptation in English is /Z/ → [dZ] (e.g. French [Zelatin] gélatine → English [dZElœtIn]) where manner is in fact the less resistant. Instead, during loanword adaptation there is a clear tendency towards unmarkedness. My hypothesis is that languages overwhelmingly adapt with the goal of eliminating the complexities of the L2; a change that involves deletion instead of insertion of a marked feature is preferred. Furthermore, my thesis shows for the first time that a consonant is statistically most likely to be imported if its preferred adaptation strategy involves insertion of a marked feature (e.g. [+continuant] or [+voice]). For example, the adaptation of English /dZ/ is /Z/ in French after insertion of marked [+continuant], but /dZ/ is overwhelmingly imported (89%), instead of adapted in French. I argue that this is to avoid the insertion of marked [+continuant]. This contrasts with Pennsylvania German (PG) where English /dZ/ is rarely imported (10%). This is because unlike in French, there is an option to adapt /dZ/ to /tS/ (deletion of marked [+voice]) in PG. However, English word-initial /t/ is heavily imported (74%), not adapted, in PG because adaptation to /d/ involves insertion of marked [+voice]. Not only does my thesis better determine the direction of adaptations but it also establishes the circumstances where L2 consonants are most likely to be imported instead of being adapted, on the basis of a well-known notion in phonology: markedness

Consonant harmony, disharmony, memory and time scales

I argue that properties of memory offer an appropriate grounding for a number of characteristics of long distance consonantal co-occurrence restrictions whose basis had so far remained unclear

The Role of Perception in the Typology of Geminate Consonants: Effects of Manner of Articulation, Segmental Environment, Position, and Stress

The present study seeks to answer the question whether consonant duration is perceived differently across consonants of different manners of articulation and in different contextual environments and whether such differences may be related to the typology of geminates. The results of the crosslinguistic identification experiment suggest higher perceptual acuity in labeling short and long consonants in sonorants than in obstruents. Duration categories were also more consistently and clearly labelled in the intervocalic than in the preconsonantal environment, in the word-initial than in the word-final position, and after stressed vowels than between unstressed vowels. These perceptual asymmetries are in line with some typological tendencies, such as the crosslinguistic preference for intervocalic and post-stress geminates, but contradict other proposed crosslinguistic patterns, such as the preference for obstruent geminates and the abundance of word-final geminates

Lexical and postlexical prominence in Tashlhiyt Berber and Moroccan Arabic

Tashlhiyt Berber (Afro-Asiatic, Berber) and Moroccan Arabic (Afro-Asiatic, Semitic), two languages spoken in Morocco, have been in contact for over 1200 years. The influence of Berber languages on the lexicon and the segmental-phonological structure of Moroccan Arabic is well-documented, whereas possible similarities in the prosodic-phonological domain have not yet been addressed in detail. This thesis brings together evidence from production and perception to bear on the question whether Tashlhiyt Berber and Moroccan Arabic also exhibit convergence in the domain of phonological prominence. Experimental results are interpreted as showing that neither language has lexical prominence asymmetries in the form of lexical stress. This lack of stress in Moroccan Arabic is unlike the undisputed presence of lexical stress in most other varieties of Arabic, which in turn suggests that this aspect of the phonology of Moroccan Arabic has resulted from contact with (Tashlhiyt) Berber. A further, theoretical contribution is made with respect to the possible correspondence between lexical and postlexical prominence structure from a typological point of view. One of the tenets of the Autosegmental Metrical approach to intonation analysis holds that prominence-marking intonational events (pitch accents) associate with lexically stressed syllables. Exactly how prominence marking is achieved in languages that lack lexical stress is little-understood, and this thesis' discussion of postlexical prominence in Tashlhiyt Berber and Moroccan Arabic provides new insights that bear on this topic. A first set of production experiments investigates, for both languages, if there are acoustic correlates to what some researchers have considered to be lexically stressed syllables. It is shown that neither language exhibits consistent acoustic enhancement of presumed stressed syllables relative to unstressed syllables. The second set of production experiments reports on the prosodic characteristics of question word interrogatives in both languages. It is shown that question words are the locus of postlexical prominence-marking events that however do not exhibit association to a sub-lexical phonological unit. A final perception experiment serves the goal of showing how native speakers of Tashlhiyt Berber and Moroccan Arabic deal with the encoding of a postlexical prominence contrast that is parasitic on a lexical prominence contrast. This is achieved by means of a 'stress deafness' experiment, the results of which show that speakers of neither language can reliably encode a lexically-specified prominence difference. Results from all three types of experiment thus converge in suggesting that lexical prominence asymmetries are not specified in the phonology of either language