The Semantics of Word Division in Northwest Semitic Writing Systems

Much focus in writing systems research has been on the correspondences on the level of the grapheme/phoneme. Seeking to complement these, this monograph considers the targets of graphic word-level units in natural language, focusing on ancient North West Semitic (NWS) writing systems, principally Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician and Ugaritic. While in Modern European languages word division tends to mark-up morphosyntactic elements, in most NWS writing systems word division is argued to target prosodic units, whereby written ‘words’ consist of units which must be pronounced together with a single primary accent or stress. This is opposed to other possibilities including Semantic word division, as seen in Middle Egyptian hieroglyphic.  The monograph starts by considering word division in a source where, unlike the rest of the material considered, the phonology is well represented, the medieval tradition of Tiberian Hebrew and Aramaic. There word division is found to mark-up ‘minimal prosodic words’, i.e. units that must under any circumstances be pronounced together as a single phonological unit. After considering the Sitz im Leben of such a word division strategy, the monograph moves on to compare Tiberian word division with that in early epigraphic NWS, where it is shown that orthographic wordhood has an almost identical distribution. The most economical explanation for this is argued to be that word division has the same underlying basis in NWS writing since the earliest times. Thereafter word division in Ugaritic alphabetic cuneiform is considered, where two word division strategies are identified, corresponding broadly to two genres of text, poetry and prose. 'Poetic' word division is taken as an instance of mainstream ‘prosodic word division’, while the other is morphosyntactic in scope anticipating later word division strategies in Europe by several centuries. Finally, the monograph considers the digital encoding of word division in NWS texts, especially the difficulties, as well as potential solutions to, the problem of marking up texts with overlapping, viz. morphosyntactic and prosodic, analyses

日本語の語レベルの韻律構造 : 通方言的な視点から

学位の種別: 課程博士審査委員会委員 : (主査)東京大学准教授 田中 伸一, 東京大学教授 伊藤 たかね, 東京大学教授 矢田部 修一, 国立国語研究所教授 バンス ティモシー, 神戸大学准教授 田中 真一University of Tokyo(東京大学

Isomorphy and Syntax-Prosody Relations in English

abstract: This dissertation investigates the precise degree to which prosody and syntax are related. One possibility is that the syntax-prosody mapping is one-to-one (“isomorphic”) at an underlying level (Chomsky & Halle 1968, Selkirk 1996, 2011, Ito & Mester 2009). This predicts that prosodic units should preferably match up with syntactic units. It is also possible that the mapping between these systems is entirely non-isomorphic, with prosody being influenced by factors from language perception and production (Wheeldon & Lahiri 1997, Lahiri & Plank 2010). In this work, I argue that both perspectives are needed in order to address the full range of phonological phenomena that have been identified in English and related languages, including word-initial lenition/flapping, word-initial segment-deletion, and vowel reduction in function words, as well as patterns of pitch accent assignment, final-pronoun constructions, and the distribution of null complementizer allomorphs. In the process, I develop models for both isomorphic and non-isomorphic phrasing. The former is cast within a Minimalist syntactic framework of Merge/Label and Bare Phrase Structure (Chomsky 2013, 2015), while the latter is characterized by a stress-based algorithm for the formation of phonological domains, following Lahiri & Plank (2010).Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation English 201

The Blackfoot demonstrative system: Function, form, and meaning

This thesis presents a comprehensive analysis of the Blackfoot demonstrative system. Previous research on Blackfoot (Uhlenbeck 1938, Taylor 1969, Frantz 2009) identifies sixteen morphemes that make up demonstrative words in the language. I propose a demonstrative template that takes into account the fixed morpheme ordering observed in demonstrative forms. Based on the proposed template, I motivate the analysis of the suffix -ka as encoding motion towards the speaker as this accounts for its position together with the suffixes -ya, -ma, and -hka, each of which encode features of motion or visibility. In describing situational functions of each of the morphemes, I make use of Imai’s (2003) inventory of spatial deictic features. I present the first analysis of the morphologically analyzable, but heretofore undescribed suffix -o as encoding the geometric configuration feature [interior]. This thesis also offers the first explanation of the syntactic contexts that govern the two identificational suffixes -ayi and -ao’ka. Earlier analyses of the Blackfoot demonstrative system focus on the spatial features encoded by situational uses of demonstratives to the exclusion of other pragmatic functions. As a result, the proposals do not address variations in meaning when used in non-situational pragmatic contexts. To address this gap in the literature, I examine non-situational pragmatic functions, as well as symbolic situational demonstrative uses (e.g. deictic projection, wider-context). The result of this study is a comprehensive analysis of the Blackfoot demonstrative system which takes into account both syntactic and pragmatic functions, providing new insights into the meanings of many of the morphemes that comprise the system. It also provides support from Blackfoot for Himmelmann’s (1996) claim that there are four universal pragmatic functions of demonstratives, and support for Diessel’s (1999) claim that situational uses are the basic demonstrative uses from which the others are derived

Syntax in experimental literature: a literary linguistic investigation

This dissertation uses the methods of literary linguistics to investigate experimental uses of literary language. I consider what kinds of formal experimentation are possible with natural language, examine how the unusual forms of experimental literature are interpreted, and ask what these kinds of experimentation show us about the nature of language. To begin with, I will discuss the goals of this study in detail, outlining the theoretical basis for a linguistic study of experimental literature and what may be learned from such a study. Literary linguistics is concerned with understanding how literary texts use language, focusing on formal aspects of literary texts and how they are related to the formal features of language. Language is the medium of literary texts, and the formal aspects of these texts - such as metre or genre - are in part enabled by using this medium. To understand regularities in the formal aspects of literary texts, literary linguistics research explores regularities in linguistic form and the ways in which the literary form exploits linguistic form