1,186 research outputs found
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
A grammar of Ulwa (Papua New Guinea)
Synopsis:
This book is a grammatical description of Ulwa, a Papuan language spoken by about 600 people living in four villages in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. Ulwa belongs to the Keram language family. This grammatical description is based on a corpus of recorded texts and elicited sentences that were collected during a total of about twelve months of research carried out between 2015 and 2018. The book aims to detail as many aspects of Ulwa grammar as possible, including matters of phonology, morphology, and syntax. It also contains a lexicon with over 1,400 entries and three fully glossed and translated texts. The book was written with a typologically oriented audience in mind, and should be of interest to Papuan specialists as well as to general linguists. It may be useful to those working on the history or classification of Papuan languages as well as those conducting typological research on any number of grammatical features
Monosyllabic Affective Hypocoristics of Korean Names
In this paper, I investigate the formation and phonological alternations of Korean monosyllabic hypocoristics that are used without a vocative marker. Korean monosyllabic hypocoristics are the result of truncation and merging. The study showed that the inclination to keep the second syllable is more pronounced in truncated forms. The most common type of merging is ‘onset of 1st syllable + rhyme of 2nd syllable’. This illustrates the symmetrical base anchoring template, in which the template’s edges are anchored to the base’s right and left edges. The phonological alternations that Korean monosyllabic hypocoristics go through include tensification of obstruents, stopping of plain fricative or affricate, nasal velarization, nasal insertion, vowel rounding, vowel simplification, and palatal glide insertion before a vowel. Consonantal alternations over vocalic alternations seem to be preferred. All of the segmental alternations are present in the Aegyo speech register
The linguistic background and the tradition of the Hebrew language of the Secunda (second column of Origen's Hexapla)
Le terme Secunda désigne la deuxième colonne de la synopse hexaplaire d’Origène. Cette synopse comportait six colonnes, d’où le nom Hexapla utilisé pour la désigner : la première contenait le texte hébreu original de l’Ancien Testament, la deuxième (Secunda) sa transcription phonétique en caractères grecs, les quatre autres les différentes traductions grecques de la Bible. La présence de graphèmes de vocaliques grecs dans la Secunda permet de mener une étude grammaticale complète de cette source, d’un point de vue phonétique et morphologique. Il manque encore actuellement une recherche qui développe le rapport entre la tradition hébraïque de la Secunda, telle qu’elle ressort de la transcription, et les autres traditions hébraïques attestées : celles sans graphèmes vocaliques (c’est-à -dire la tradition samaritaine et le corpus qumranien) et les traditions plus tardives et vocalisées pendant la période médiévale (les traditions massorétique tibérienne, babylonienne et palestinienne). Ce dernier point est précisément l’objet de cette thèse, qui vise à mieux comprendre le statut de l’hébreu de la Secunda, ses relations avec les autres traditions hébraïques et sa place dans l’histoire de la langue. Cette question est abordée à travers différentes étapes : en partant d’une étude phonétique et morphologique de la langue hébraïque de la colonne, on arrive à une hypothèse de datation qui permet une comparaison directe entre l’hébreu hexaplaire et les autres traditions mentionnées ci-dessus. La comparaison entre la Secunda et les autres traditions est cruciale pour situer correctement la Secunda dans l’histoire de la langue hébraïque : au niveau synchronique, elle permet de mettre en évidence ses éléments dialectaux, documentés dans les transcriptions de la Secunda et dans les traditions de la même époque ; au niveau diachronique, elle fournit des terminus ante ou post quem pour des phénomènes bien attestés dans les traditions tardives.The term Secunda refers to the second column of Origen’s synopsis of Hexapla. This synopsis consisted of six columns, from which comes the name Hexapla employed to designate it: the first column contained the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the second (Secunda) its phonetic transcription in Greek characters, the other four the different Greek translations of the Bible. The presence of Greek vowel graphemes in the Secunda makes possible to conduct a comprehensive grammatical study of that source, phonetically and morphologically. At present there is still a lack of research that develops the relationship between the Hebrew language tradition of the Secunda, as emerging from the transcription, and the other attested Hebrew language traditions: those without vowel graphemes (i.e., the Samaritan tradition and the Qumran corpus) and the later, vocalized in the medieval period (the Tiberian, Babylonian and the Palestinian). The latter point is precisely the subject of this thesis, which aims to better understand the Hebrew language status of Secunda, its relation to other traditions of Hebrew and its place in the history of the language. This issue is approached through different stages: moving from a phonetic and morphological study of the Hebrew language of the column, we arrive at a dating hypothesis that allows for a direct comparison between the hexaplaric Hebrew and the other traditions mentioned above. The comparison between the Secunda and the other traditions is crucial to correctly situating the Secunda in the history of the Hebrew language: at the synchronic level, it serves the function of highlighting its dialectal elements, documented in the transcriptions of the Secunda and in the traditions of the same epoch; at the diachronic level, it provides a terminus ante or post quem for phenomena well attested in the late traditions
Approximation in Morphology
This Special Issue "Approximation in Morphology" has been collated from peer-reviewed papers presented at the ApproxiMo 'discontinuous' workshop (2022), which was held online between December 2021 and May 2022, and organized by Francesca Masini (Bologna), Muriel Norde (Berlin) and Kristel Van Goethem (Louvain)
The Typological Diversity of Morphomes: A Cross-Linguistic Study of Unnatural Morphology
This is the first typologically-oriented book-length treatment of morphomes, systematic morphological identities, usually within inflectional paradigms, that do not map onto syntactic or semantic natural classes. In the first half of the book, Borja Herce outlines the theoretical and empirical challenges associated with the identification and definition of morphomes, and surveys their links with related notions such as syncretism, homophony, segmentation, and economy, among others. He also presents the different ways in which morphomic structures in a language have been observed to emerge, change, and disappear. The second part of the book contains its core contribution: a database of 120 morphomes across 79 languages from a range of families, which are presented and analysed in detail. A range of findings emerge as a result, including the idiosyncratic nature of morphomes in the Romance languages, the existence of cross-linguistically recurrent unnatural patterns, and the preference for more natural structures even among morphomes. The database also allows further explorations of other issues such as the effect of learnability and communicative efficiency on morphological structures, and the lexical and grammatical informativity of morphs and their distribution
The Impact of Vowel Inventory Size and Linguistic Environment when Learning Two Languages: The Case of English and Greek
Producing phonemic contrasts in two typologically different languages, can prove a difficult task for speakers of those languages, even experienced ones (for instance, Boersma & Escudero, 2008; Kivistö-de Souza & Carlet, 2014), from birth or otherwise. This thesis discusses the effects of linguistic environment and phonemic inventories in the production of British English vowels. Greek and English were chosen as a language pair for further investigation, due to the fact that their vocalic inventories differ significantly in terms of the number of phonemes each has, the phonemic categories identified, as well as the vowel features in each. In order to explore the role of the linguistic environment, groups of bilingual Greek - English children based in the United Kingdom and in Greece took part in the first round of experiments. In order to explore further the role of phonemic inventories a group of native Greek second language learners of English also took part in the same set of tasks. The productions of British English vowels and vowel contrasts by each participant group was assessed by a series of speech production tasks analysing acoustic properties of the vowel categories in question. Bilingual children in Greece performed in a similar manner to monolingual controls, however, children raised in the UK deviated from monolingual norms. Quality of input and amount of exposure to each language in the two linguistic environments seem to be predicting factors for vowel production outcomes. Native Greek second language learners of English produced British English vowels similarly to monolingual controls when it came to both spectral and temporal cues. This could be attributed to the amount of experience second language learners had with English throughout their lifespan
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