/R/ Lenition in Quebec French: Evidence from the Distribution of 9 Allophones in Large Corpora

Lenition is a process whereby a segment shifts to a "weaker" variant (i.e., closer to deletion in the history of languages). Lenition is also a positional phenomenon, typically affecting intervocalic or coda consonants before post-coda or post-pausal onsets. While the lenition of stops is well studied in Romance languages, investigations about other segments are rare. We propose to fill this gap by focusing on /R/ in Québec French (QF), a variety documented to exhibit up to 9 allophones. We examine 50K+ read words from the PFCQuébec Corpus [1] that we manually annotated (for voicing, manner and place of articulation – based on perception and spectrograms). The analysis of the distribution of /R/ in different syllabic positions shows that lenited (approximantized, vocalized and non-realized) variants indeed appear in leniting positions (coda and intervocalic), thus showing that /R/ realizations in QF are not in free variation but indeed an instance of lenition

The licensing and interpretation of coronality: A new approach.

This thesis presents a new approach to the behavior of coronal segments. It examines seven aspects of coronal uniqueness; (i) the interaction of coronal consonants with front vowels, (ii) the confinement of liquids to coronal Place, (iii) the preference of "weak" syllabic sites for coronal Place, the processes of (iv) palatalization and (v) coronalization of coronal and non-coronal consonants by palatal glides and front vowels, (vi) the confinement of consonant harmony processes to consonants of coronal Place, and finally, (vii) the frequency and subplace richness of the coronal Place. It is argued that this range of behavior can be given a unified analysis if coronality is represented by the Government Phonological element [I]. Further, this element is argued to be the head of a Resonance Phrase in an element-geometric tree which is divided into a Resonance, Manner and Laryngeal Phrase. The headship of [I] gives this element greater powers to license other (Place, Manner and Laryngeal) elements, so deriving the behavior noted. This is contrasted with approaches which underspecify coronal Place, or try to capture coronal anomalies by recourse to phonetic context. The headship or dependency of elements drives element combinations, and thus derives the structure of phonemic inventories. This is traced to functional underpinnings, drawing on phonetic theories which argue for the optimality of segments based on the acoustically integrative effects of the articulations by which they are executed. The interpretation of [I] is thus investigated in some detail. At the level of segment generation, therefore, it is argued that there are formal and functional constraints operating. Finally, the distribution of coronal segments in the word is looked at in a broad range of typologically diverse languages. This is modeled using the above tools, in conjunction with a Government Phonology approach to syllabic structure and licensing

SOUND CHANGE AS A COMPLEX DYNAMIC PHENOMENON AND THE BLURRINESS OF GRAMMAR STABILITY

Desde o final da década de 1980, o estudo do conhecimento linguístico tem intensamente congregado diferentes áreas para captar com abrangência diversas questões relacionadas ao desenvolvimento, à variação e à mudança linguística. Muitos desses campos podem ser representados pela Teoria dos Sistemas Dinâmicos Complexos (CDST), uma abordagem utilizada para modelar e explicar fenômenos lingüísticos e suas implicações. Assim, o objetivo deste artigo encontra-se em duas vias: primeiramente, visa a apresentar o paradigma da CDST aplicada aos estudos linguísticos; em segundo lugar, partindo de uma perspectiva dinâmica complexa, discute variação e mudança sonora como sendo partes básicas e primordiais da essência das línguas naturais. Essa perspectiva lança luz sobre novas formas de se abordar uma língua e é fundamental para a compreensão de que essa se trata de um organismo vivo cujas propriedades estão constantemente mudando e evoluindo. DOI: https://doi.org/10.47295/mren.v8i2.196

An exploration of the rhythm of Malay

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in speech rhythm. However we still lack a clear understanding of the nature of rhythm and rhythmic differences across languages. Various metrics have been proposed as means for measuring rhythm on the phonetic level and making typological comparisons between languages (Ramus et al, 1999; Grabe & Low, 2002; Dellwo, 2006) but the debate is ongoing on the extent to which these metrics capture the rhythmic basis of speech (Arvaniti, 2009; Fletcher, in press). Furthermore, cross linguistic studies of rhythm have covered a relatively small number of languages and research on previously unclassified languages is necessary to fully develop the typology of rhythm. This study examines the rhythmic features of Malay, for which, to date, relatively little work has been carried out on aspects rhythm and timing. The material for the analysis comprised 10 sentences produced by 20 speakers of standard Malay (10 males and 10 females). The recordings were first analysed using rhythm metrics proposed by Ramus et. al (1999) and Grabe & Low (2002). These metrics (∆C, %V, rPVI, nPVI) are based on durational measurements of vocalic and consonantal intervals. The results indicated that Malay clustered with other so-called syllable-timed languages like French and Spanish on the basis of all metrics. However, underlying the overall findings for these metrics there was a large degree of variability in values across speakers and sentences, with some speakers having values in the range typical of stressed-timed languages like English. Further analysis has been carried out in light of Fletcher’s (in press) argument that measurements based on duration do not wholly reflect speech rhythm as there are many other factors that can influence values of consonantal and vocalic intervals, and Arvaniti’s (2009) suggestion that other features of speech should also be considered in description of rhythm to discover what contributes to listeners’ perception of regularity. Spectrographic analysis of the Malay recordings brought to light two parameters that displayed consistency and regularity for all speakers and sentences: the duration of individual vowels and the duration of intervals between intensity minima. This poster presents the results of these investigations and points to connections between the features which seem to be consistently regulated in the timing of Malay connected speech and aspects of Malay phonology. The results are discussed in light of current debate on the descriptions of rhythm

Elements, Government, and Licensing: Developments in phonology

Elements, Government, and Licensing brings together new theoretical and empirical developments in phonology. It covers three principal domains of phonological representation: melody and segmental structure; tone, prosody and prosodic structure; and phonological relations, empty categories, and vowel-zero alternations. Theoretical topics covered include the formalisation of Element Theory, the hotly debated topic of structural recursion in phonology, and the empirical status of government. In addition, a wealth of new analyses and empirical evidence sheds new light on empty categories in phonology, the analysis of certain consonantal sequences, phonological and non-phonological alternation, the elemental composition of segments, and many more. Taking up long-standing empirical and theoretical issues informed by the Government Phonology and Element Theory, this book provides theoretical advances while also bringing to light new empirical evidence and analysis challenging previous generalisations. The insights offered here will be equally exciting for phonologists working on related issues inside and outside the Principles & Parameters programme, such as researchers working in Optimality Theory or classical rule-based phonology

Windesi Wamesa Morphophonology

Wamesa [wam] is an endangered Austronesian language spoken in the south-eastern Bird’s Head of New Guinea, in the Indonesian province of West Papua. is dissertation provides a description and formal analysis of the phonology and morphology of the Windesi dialect based on the author’s fieldwork with speakers of the language. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the language, its speakers, and the cultural, geographic, and linguistic context in which Wamesa is spoken. It also provides background on the fieldwork which forms the basis of this dissertation and the resulting corpus. Chapter 2 describes the phonology of Wamesa, including its phoneme inventory, phonotactics, and productive phonological processes, with phonetic detail. e second half of the chapter gives an account of the phonological adaptation of loan words into Wamesa. Chapter 3 gives a formal analysis of stress assignment in the language based in Optimality eory. Chapter 4 describes the Wamesa clitics and affixes, and Chapter 5 gives an account of the three major word classes, nouns, verbs, and adjectives, as well as modes of spatial expression and a selection of other minor word classes. Chapter 6 gives a formal synchronic analysis of the infixation of verbal subject agreement affixes in Wamesa, followed by a diachronic account of how the paern might have arisen from incremental improvements in speech production and perception

Language In My Mouth: Linguistic Variation in the Nmbo Speech Community of Southern New Guinea

This thesis is a mixed-methods investigation into the question of the sociolinguistics of linguistic diversity in Papua New Guinea. Social and cultural traits of New Guinean speech communities have been hypothesised as conducive to language differentiation and diversification (Laycock 1991, Thurston 1987, 1992, Foley 2000, Ross 2001), however there have been few empirical studies to support these hypotheses. In this thesis I investigate linguistic micro-variations within a contemporary New Guinean speech community, with the goal of identifying socio-cultural pressures that affect language variation and change. The community under investigation is the Nmbo speech community located in the Morehead area of Southern New Guinea. It is a highly multilingual community in the middle of the Nambu branch dialect chain, and consists primarily of the three villages Govav, Bevdvn, and Arovwe. The ideologically licensed speakers of Nmbo are the Kerake tribe people, but due to the practice of marriage exogamy, a large portion of non-Kerake people speak Nmbo as an additional language learnt from their parents or spouse. This thesis embraces the complexities of the multilingual ecology by including data from Kerake women who have married out of the Nmbo villages into the neighbouring Nen language village of Bimadbn. The empirical investigations bring data from three directions. First are the qualitative descriptions based on my own ethnographic fieldwork supported by prior ethnographic descriptions. The picture to emerge is of an egalitarian multilingual speech community. The qualitative descriptions also provide basic facts about demographics and social structures of the community. Second is the linguistic description of the Nmbo language. Nmbo is an under-described language without substantial prior description, and this thesis contains a sketch grammar covering the basics aspects of Nmbo grammar. Finally there are three quantitative studies of variation. The vowel sociophonetic study and the word initial [h]-drop study are classic Labovian variationist studies that investigate patterns of variation across a sample of speakers. The former is based of elicited word list data, and the latter on naturalistic speech data. The third quantitative study takes a grammaticalisation approach to an emergent topic marker in a topicalising construction from a relative clause construction. This is the first thesis ever produced providing qualitative, descriptive, and quantitative data from a New Guinean speech community within a language ecology of vital indigenous multilingualism. The contributions of the thesis are two fold. Firstly, this thesis brings grammatical and sociolinguistic descriptions from an under-studied language. It is a socio-grammar (Nagy 2009) that considers language ecology, sociolinguistics, and grammatical description. Secondly, this thesis contributes empirical data on the sociolinguistics of small-scale speech communities. The classic sociolinguistic variable of gender is not found to be particularly significant in the variables studied, despite the community being highly gendered in other social domains. Village, however, shows some significance. As far as the three variables are concerned, Nmbo speakers show little community-internal variation and paint a picture of a tight-knit society of intimates (Trudgill 2011). The conclusion to the question of the sociolinguistics of diversification is that while there is some evidence of sociolinguistic differentiation within the Nmbo speech community, the most important social groups to orient against are the other sister language groups in the Morehead area. The nascent variation within the Nmbo speech community, combined with the ethnographic evidence of a cluster of dense and multiplex social networks, suggest that should the social need to differentiate between other Kerake arise, linguistic differentiation may occur rapidly

German(ic) in language contact

It is well-known that contact between speakers of different languages or varieties leads to dynamics in many respects. From a grammatical perspective, especially contact between closely related languages/varieties fosters contact-induced innovations. The evaluation of such innovations reveals speakers’ attitudes and is in turn an important aspect of the sociolinguistic dynamics linked to language contact. In this volume, we assemble studies on such settings where typologically congruent languages are in contact, i.e. language contact within the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Languages involved include Afrikaans, Danish, English, Frisian, (Low and High) German, and Yiddish. The main focus is on constellations where a variety of German is involved (which is why we use the term ‘German(ic)’ in this book)

Children with persisting speech difficulties: exploring speech production and intelligibility across different contexts

Background and purpose Children with persisting speech difficulties (PSD) may present with severe and ongoing impairments in segmental and prosodic output which can result in poor intelligibility. The purpose of this study was to examine the speech processing skills and intelligibility of four children with PSD, carrying out detailed phonetic and phonological analysis, and investigation of their speech output and intelligibility in single words (SW) and multi-word utterances (MWU). Method Participants were aged 6;5 to 7;3 at the start of the study. Their speech processing was examined through: • Psycholinguistic assessment of input and output processing skills (Joy Stackhouse & Wells, 1997) • Perceptual transcription and analysis of the production of SW, imitated sentences and conversational speech (CS) at two points in time (T1 and T2). Speech output data were considered in the context of phonological process analysis (PPA) and then through further analysis of segmental and prosodic aspects of MWU. Intelligibility was measured through 66 unfamiliar adult listeners orthographically transcribing edited samples from each child of 10 SW, 5 imitated sentences and 5 samples of CS from T1 and T2. Results Psycholinguistic tasks revealed that the children had pervasive and complex speech processing difficulties. PPA based on traditional SW sampling failed to capture important aspects of children's speech; analysis of MWU revealed phonetic and prosodic features essential to describing and understanding children's development of "real talk"(Howard, 2007, p. 20). Intelligibility outcomes revealed listeners' recognition was better for MWU in three of the children; intelligibility was better for all children at T2. Implications Children with PSD benefit from thorough investigation of Input and output speech processing skills; assessment of MWU is essential in capturing segmental and prosodic aspects of speech output to explain poor intelligibility and plan Intervention