Sonority-driven stress and vowel reduction in Uyghur

A number of authors have argued that sonority differences among vowels may interact with weight-sensitive stress placement (e.g. Kenstowicz 1994, 1997; de Lacy 2006). In previous work on sonority-sensitivity, variable stress placement has usually been assumed. In this paper, I examine the role of sonority in Uyghur, a language with fixed stress. I argue that sonority is encoded as a weight distinction in the language, which drives asymmetric lengthening of word-final high vowels. I demonstrate that a mora-based analysis also offers insight into medial vowel raising in the language, and sketch out an Optimality theoretic account of the data. Findings from this study support the recent claim made by Shih & de Lacy (2019) that sonority differences are only indirectly available to the grammar in the form of weight distinctions

Morpheme Boundaries and Structural Change: Affixes Running Amok

Diachronic morphosyntacticians of all theoretical persuasions agree that there is a tendency for more lexical linguistic material to develop more functional characteristics over time, a process generally known as grammaticalization. While most previous work on grammaticalization has been conducted in surface-oriented functionalist frameworks, this dissertation aims to illuminate the deeper structural properties of a sub-set of these phenomena, diachronic affixation, as well as its much rarer opposite, de-affixation, a phenomenon in which previously bound material becomes a syntactically independent form. This approach differs from previous generative approaches to this problem in utilising a non-lexicalist, piece-based, syntactic approach to morphology, Distributed Morphology (DM), according to which both words and phrases are built by the same generative system. Besides providing a schematic typology for the structural properties of affix-genesis and highlighting the theoretical advantage of DM, this dissertation has four main theoretical points. First, it makes explicit predictions about the locus of newly affixed material. Second, it argues, that affix-exodus is no less natural a change than affix-genesis. Third, it explores the similarities between affix-exodus and two other varieties of linguistic change: morphological re-cuttings and the disintegration of complex heads. Finally, it demonstrates that similar phenomena can also occur within a word. This is predicted by a theoretical framework with the properties of DM specified above. In addition to its specific contribution to work on diachronic morphosyntax, this dissertation has implications for morphology, morphosyntax, and historical linguistics more broadly, and argues that no additional diachronic-specific component is needed in the grammar

Alignment and Adjacency in Optimality Theory: evidence from Warlpiri and Arrernte

The goal of this thesis is to explore alignment and adjacency of constituents in the framework of Optimality Theory. Under the notion of alignment, certain categories, prosodic and morphological, are required to correspond to certain other categories, prosodic or morphological. The alignment of categories is achieved through the operation of constraints which evaluate the wellformedness of outputs. The constraints on the alignment of categories and the ranking of these constraints are examined with emphasis on two Australian languages, Warlpiri and Arrernte. The aim is to provide an adequate account in the theory of Optimality of the processes of stress, reduplication and vowel harmony evident in the data. The thesis expands on the range of edges for the alignment of feet. Foot alignment is developed to account for the fact that the edges of intonational phrases, morphemes, and specific morphemes, as well as phonologically specific syllables, play an active role in determining the location of feet. An additional finding is that the location of feet can also be determined by adjacency, resolving conflict between morphological alignment, and ensuring rhythmic harmony. Requirements on adjacency are further supported to account for segmental harmony, where harmony provides evidence for the simultaneous action of segmental and prosodic processes. The analysis provides a unified account of binary and ternary rhythm recommending modifications to alignment of certain categories, thereby laying the groundwork to deal with variation. The account of variation involves relaxing certain constraints. In addition, the notion of rhythm is expanded to account for onset sensitivity to stress, with evidence of this sensitivity found in reduplication and allomorphy. The interaction of prosodic categories with each other and with morphological categories can be directly captured in OT, providing a unified and coherent account of phenomena, some of which were previously seen as exceptions and, therefore unrelated and arbitrary

Statistical Parsing by Machine Learning from a Classical Arabic Treebank

Research into statistical parsing for English has enjoyed over a decade of successful results. However, adapting these models to other languages has met with difficulties. Previous comparative work has shown that Modern Arabic is one of the most difficult languages to parse due to rich morphology and free word order. Classical Arabic is the ancient form of Arabic, and is understudied in computational linguistics, relative to its worldwide reach as the language of the Quran. The thesis is based on seven publications that make significant contributions to knowledge relating to annotating and parsing Classical Arabic. Classical Arabic has been studied in depth by grammarians for over a thousand years using a traditional grammar known as i’rāb (إعغاة ). Using this grammar to develop a representation for parsing is challenging, as it describes syntax using a hybrid of phrase-structure and dependency relations. This work aims to advance the state-of-the-art for hybrid parsing by introducing a formal representation for annotation and a resource for machine learning. The main contributions are the first treebank for Classical Arabic and the first statistical dependency-based parser in any language for ellipsis, dropped pronouns and hybrid representations. A central argument of this thesis is that using a hybrid representation closely aligned to traditional grammar leads to improved parsing for Arabic. To test this hypothesis, two approaches are compared. As a reference, a pure dependency parser is adapted using graph transformations, resulting in an 87.47% F1-score. This is compared to an integrated parsing model with an F1-score of 89.03%, demonstrating that joint dependency-constituency parsing is better suited to Classical Arabic. The Quran was chosen for annotation as a large body of work exists providing detailed syntactic analysis. Volunteer crowdsourcing is used for annotation in combination with expert supervision. A practical result of the annotation effort is the corpus website: http://corpus.quran.com, an educational resource with over two million users per year

Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Semantik

Sinn & Bedeutung - the annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Semantik - aims to bring together both established researchers and new blood working on current issues in natural language semantics, pragmatics, the syntax-semantics interface, the philosophy of language or carrying out psycholinguistic studies related to meaning. Every year, the conference moves to a different location in Europe. The 2010 conference - Sinn & Bedeutung 15 - took place on September 9 - 11 at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, organized by the Department for German Studies

Attribute value phonology

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D93955 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Consonant cluster phonotactics : a perceptual approach

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (p. [309]-345).This dissertation deals with deletion and epenthesis processes conditioned or constrained by the consonantal environment, essentially consonant deletion, vowel epenthesis and vowel deletion. It is argued that the standard generative approach to these processes, which relies on the syllable and the principle of prosodic licensing, is empirically inadequate, and an alternative sequential approach based on perceptual factors is developed. It is proposed that the likelihood that a consonant deletes, triggers epenthesis or blocks vowel deletion correlates with the quality and quantity of the auditory cues associated to it in a given context. The approach is implemented in Optimality Theory and adopts more specifically the 'Licensing by cue' framework developed by Steriade (1997, 1999). New empirical generalizations concerning deletion and epenthesis processes are uncovered, in particular 1) the fact that stops are more likely than other consonants to delete, trigger epenthesis or block deletion; 2) the role of syntagmatic contrast in deletion and epenthesis processes; 3) the role of the audibility of stop release bursts; 4) the existence of cumulative edge effects, whereby more and more phonotactic combinations are licensed at the edges of prosodic domains as we go up the prosodic hierarchy. These generalizations are elucidated in terms of internal and contextual cues, modulation in the acoustic signal, and cue enhancement processes at edges of prosodic domains. The proposed perceptual approach achieves a substantial simplification and unification of the conceptual apparatus necessary to analyze deletion and epenthesis processes. It subsumes under the more general notion of perceptual salience principles of syllable well-formedness and the Obligatory Contour Principle. Furthermore, it eliminates the need for exceptional mechanisms such as extra syllabicity at domain edges. The analysis is based on the study of deletion and epenthesis processes in a variety of languages. Detailed investigations of schwa in Parisian French, cluster simplification in Quebec French and stop deletion and vowel epenthesis in Ondarroa Basque are provided.by Marie-Hélène Côté.Ph.D

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