Reconstructing Indo-European Syllabification

The chief concern of this dissertation is to investigate a fundamental, yet unsolved problem within the phonology of Proto-Indo-European (PIE): the process of syllabification. I show that by analyzing the much more easily reconstructable word-edge clusters we may predict which types of consonant clusters can occur word-medially, provided that we assume a special status for certain consonants at word’s edge. Having thus analyzed the entire PIE phonological system, I believe I have developed the first working hypothesis of Indo-European syllabification, which we may now use to pre- dict which types of syllable-driven rules of consonant deletion and vowel epenthesis occurred within PIE. My dissertation argues that there existed at least five phonologi- cal processes of this type. The second half of the dissertation focuses on the problem of Sievers’ Law, through which I argue for the tendency in PIE to keep morphemes syllabically distinct, in accordance with a high-ranking constraint ALIGN. I conclude by proposing that the assumption of morphological relevance in the syllabic derivation provides us with a mechanism to reconcile the well-established principle of ONSET MAXIMIZATION with the reconstructable parsing of VCCV sequences as VC.CV

Scottish Gaelic

Scottish Gaelic is a minority language of Scotland spoken by approximately 58,000 people, or 1% of the Scottish population (speaker numbers from the 2011 Census available in National Records of Scotland 2015). Here, we refer to the language as 'Gaelic', pronounced in British English as is customary within the Gaelic-speaking community. In Gaelic, the language is referred to as Gàidhlig /kalc/. Gaelic is a Celtic language, closely related to Irish (MacAulay 1992, Ní Chasaide 1999, Gillies 2009). Although Gaelic was widely spoken across much of Scotland in medieval times (Withers 1984, Clancy 2009), the language has recently declined in traditional areas such as the western seaboard and western islands of Scotland and is now considered 'definitely endangered' by UNESCO classification (Moseley 2010). Analysis of the location of Gaelic speakers in Scotland and maps from the most recent Census in 2011 can be found in National Records of Scotland (2015). Figure 1 shows the location of Gaelic speakers in Scotland as a percentage of the inhabitants aged over three in each Civil Parish who reported being able to speak Gaelic in the 2011 Census

Consonant colour and vocalism in the history of Irish

Wydział AnglistykiNiniejsza praca poświęcona jest związanym ze sobą kwestiom barwienia spółgłosek i wokalizmu w historii języka Irlandzkiego, ze szczególną uwagą na okres staro-irlandzki. Głównym twierdzeniem pracy jest to, że język staro-irlandzki miał trzy odrębne serie spółgłosek, polegających na barwieniu, oraz minimalny (wertykalny) system samogłosek składający się z dwóch tylko komponentów. Obrona głównego twierdzenia ma podwójny charakter: empiryczny i typologiczny. Część typologiczna bazuje na kompleksowym przeglądzie minimalnych systemów samogłosek w językach świata. Część empiryczna oparta jest na opisie morfologii czasownika staro-irlandzkiego, w którym występują trzy barwy spółgłoskowe, ale tylko dwie samogłoski.This dissertation deals with the related questions of consonant colour and vocalism in the history of Irish, focusing particularly on the Old Irish period. It argues that Old Irish had three distinct series of consonant colour, and a vertical vowel system of only two members. This position is defended typologically, by means of a comprehensive survey of minimal and vertical vowel systems in the cross-linguistic literature, and also empirically, through a detailed description of Old Irish verbal morphology in terms of a phonological system with three consonant colours and only two vowels

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

The cross-linguistic performance of word segmentation models over time.

We select three word segmentation models with psycholinguistic foundations - transitional probabilities, the diphone-based segmenter, and PUDDLE - which track phoneme co-occurrence and positional frequencies in input strings, and in the case of PUDDLE build lexical and diphone inventories. The models are evaluated on caregiver utterances in 132 CHILDES corpora representing 28 languages and 11.9 m words. PUDDLE shows the best performance overall, albeit with wide cross-linguistic variation. We explore the reasons for this variation, fitting regression models to performance scores with linguistic properties which capture lexico-phonological characteristics of the input: word length, utterance length, diversity in the lexicon, the frequency of one-word utterances, the regularity of phoneme patterns at word boundaries, and the distribution of diphones in each language. These properties together explain four-tenths of the observed variation in segmentation performance, a strong outcome and a solid foundation for studying further variables which make the segmentation task difficult

A Typology of Stress- and Foot-Sensitive Consonantal Phenomena

This article investigates consonantal alternations that are conditioned by stress and/ or foot-structure. A survey of 78 languages from 37 language families reveals three types of consonantal phenomena: (i) those strictly motivated by stress (as in Senoufo lengthening), (ii) those exclusively conditioned by foot structure (as in /h/ epenthesis in Huariapano), and (iii) those motivated both by stress and foot structure (as in flapping in American English).The fact that stress-only and foot-only consonantal phenomena are attested alongside stress/foot structure conditioned phenomena leads to the proposal that stress and foot structure can work independently, contradicting the traditional view of foot structure organization as signaled by stress-based prominence. It is proposed that four main factors are at play in the consonantal phenomena under investigation: perception, duration, aerodynamics, and prominence. Duration, aerodynamics and perceptual ambiguity are primarily phonetic, while prominence and other perceptual factors are primarily phonological. It is shown that the mechanism of Prominence Alignment in Optimality Theory captures not only consonantal alternations based on prominence, but can also be extended to those with durational and aerodynamic bases. This article also makes predictions regarding unattested stress/foot sensitive alternations connected to the four factors mentioned above