Issues in the phonology of prominence

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1990.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 241-244).by Scott Meredith.Ph.D

Temporal articulatory stability, phonological variation, and lexical contrast preservation in diaspora Tibetan

This dissertation examines how lexical tone can be represented with articulatory gestures, and the ways a gestural perspective can inform synchronic and diachronic analysis of the phonology and phonetics of a language. Tibetan is chosen an example of a language with interacting laryngeal and tonal phonology, a history of tonogenesis and dialect diversification, and recent contact-induced realignment of the tonal and consonantal systems. Despite variation in voice onset time (VOT) and presence/absence of the lexical tone contrast, speakers retain a consistent relative timing of consonant and vowel gestures. Recent research has attempted to integrate tone into the framework of Articulatory Phonology through the addition of tone gestures. Unlike other theories of phonetics-phonology, Articulatory Phonology uniquely incorporates relative timing as a key parameter. This allows the system to represent contrasts instantiated not just in the presence or absence of gestures, but also in how gestures are timed with each other. Building on the different predictions of various timing relations, along with the historical developments in the language, hypotheses are generated and tested with acoustic and articulatory experiments. Following an overview of relevant theory, the second chapter surveys past literature on the history of sound change and present phonological diversity of Tibetic dialects. Whereas Old Tibetan lacked lexical tone, contrasted voiced and voiceless obstruents, and exhibited complex clusters, a series of overlapping sound changes have led to some modern varieties that are tone, lack clusters, and vary in the expression of voicing and aspiration. Furthermore, speakers in the Tibetan diaspora use a variety that has grown out of the contact between diverse Tibetic dialects. The state of the language and the dynamics of diaspora have created a situation ripe for sound change, including the recombination of elements from different dialects and, potentially, the loss of tone contrasts. The nature of the diaspora Tibetan is investigated through an acoustic corpus study. Recordings made in Kathmandu, Nepal, are being transcribed and forced-aligned into a useful audio corpus. Speakers in the corpus come from diverse backgrounds across and outside traditional Tibetan-speaking regions, but the analysis presented here focuses on speakers who grew up in diaspora, with a mixed input of Standard Tibetan (spyi skad) and other Tibetan varieties. Especially notable among these speakers is the high variability of voice onset time (VOT) and its interaction with tone. An analysis of this data in terms of the relative timing of oral, laryngeal, and tone gestures leads to the generation of hypotheses for testing using articulatory data. The articulatory study is conducted using electromagnetic articulography (EMA), and six Tibetan-speaking participants. The key finding is that the relative timing of consonant and vowel gestures is consistent across phonological categories and across speakers who do and do not contrast tone. This result leads to the conclusion that the relative timing of speech gestures is conserved and acquired independently. Speakers acquire and generalize a limited inventory of timing patterns, and can use timing patterns even when the conditioning environment for the development of those patterns, namely tone, has been lost

Marking the Unexpected: Evidence from Navajo to Support a Metadiscourse Domain

In typological research on mirativity, discussion often centers on the relationship between mirativity, evidentiality, and epistemic modality (Chafe & Nichols 1987; DeLancey 1997, 2012; Aikhenvald 2004, 2012; Peterson 2010). However, in individual languages, speakers mobilize pragmatic extensions that may differentially blend the categorical distinctions. Athabaskan languages have played a particularly important role in this discussion (DeLancey 2001 cited in Peterson 2010) due to the presence of particles that are said to clearly encode mirativity independent of evidentiality, evidence that mirativity warrants a distinct grammatical category. This paper analyzes the function and distribution of the Navajo enclitic lá as it is used by speakers in interaction, based on the Navajo Conversational Corpus (Mithun ed 2015 NSF-DEL project 0853598). In its most frequent use, lá functions as an interrogative enclitic to mark information questions (Reichard 1951; Young & Morgan 1987; Willie 1996), however this same form may encode what has been described as mirativity. Like other miratives, lá may mark surprise, counter-expectation, discovery, and even reported speech (DeLancey 1990, 1997, 2001; Aikhenvald 2004, 2012). Though the two are seemingly unrelated synchronically, a close examination of the pragmatic functions of these enclitics, as well as consideration of comparative Athabaskan evidence, shows that the two enclitics both provide metadiscourse commentary through contrastive focus on the unexpectedness of a proposition. These data contribute to the goal of better understanding how speakers mark new and surprising information in conversation (Aikhenvald 2004), and also support the interactional relevance of the semantic domain of expectation, subsuming both contrastive focus and surprise (Behrens 2012)

Tones of Lhasa Tibetan

The author of this thesis claims that Lhasa Tibetan has more tonal contrasts than has hitherto generally been recognized. The proposed tonal classification has interesting consequences for the segmental phonology, in particular for the voicing status of initial stops and for some aspects of the phonology of stem compounds. No attempt has been made to adhere strictly to a specific school of pho¬ nology; but the presentation of the material has been in¬ fluenced by classical phonemic, generative, and natural phonology theory. A special effort has been made through out the study to give a fair amount of phonetic data in support of the analysis proposed

From the Unexpected to the Unbelievable: Thetics, Miratives and Exclamatives in Conceptual Space

This study investigates the relationship between three linguistic functions: thetics, miratives and exclamatives. Thetics are an information structure configuration that conveys that the information is new to the addressee. The thetic subtypes selected for this study are the following: existentials (e.g. There are apples in the kitchen); presentatives (e.g. Heres your book); weather statements (e.g. It rains); physical sensation statements (e.g. My HEAD hurts) and hot news (e.g. MIchael JACKson died). Thetics do not perform a predication but present the state of affairs as a whole. Crosslinguistically, they tend to use morphosyntactic strategies that distinguish them from prototypical predications. Similar morphosyntactic strategies can also be found in miratives and exclamatives. Miratives are defined as grammatical markers that convey that the information is suprising for the speaker, whereas exclamatives are defined as a sentence type that conveys surprise with respect to a scalar extent that has surpassed the current expectations (e.g. How beautiful you are!). I hypothesize that the structural similarities between these functions are motivated by semantic resemblance. The structural features of these functions are compared in a sample of 76 languages, from which 360 constructions were extracted. Multidimensional scaling was used in order to construct a spatial representation of the degree of similarity/dissimilarity of the constructions. The resulting spatial map shows a dimension motivated by a semantic distinction between event-central and entity-central statements. It also shows a second dimension motivated by the following distinctions: 1) an existential domain, 2) a presentational domain, 3) a mirative domain, and 4) an exclamative domain. Several case studies illustrating the relationships between the functions are presented. It is also demonstrated that miratives can establish a distinction between unexpected and misexpected events. As for exclamatives, it is shown that they are related to linguistic hedges that convey the degree of membership of an item into a category. Several neurobiological and psychological correlates are proposed: thetics correspond to two types of awareness, whereas miratives and exclamatives are related to different stages of a cognitive-evolutionary model of surprise

Relational correspondence in tone sandhi

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 283-292).This dissertation proposes that the constraint component of OT grammars should be expanded to include a family of faithfulness constraints that evaluate input-output/output-output mappings for the preservation of gross Fo contours (rising, falling, level) across two or more segments. Following Steriade (2006), I refer to constraints in this family as Relational Correspondence constraints. The central tenet of Relational Correspondence is that phonological processes are shaped by pressure to maintain perceptual similarity between correspondent relations between successive elements, or syntagmatic contrast preservation in the auditory domain Fo, as opposed to paradigmatic contrast preservation according to which the well-formedness of an entity is evaluated with reference to the set of entities it contrasts with. Two types of Relational Correspondence are distinguished in this work: Contour and Slope Correspondence. Contour Correspondence, formulated as RELCORR constraints, assesses correspondence of the phonological height (Fo scaling) relation between successive tones. Four height relations are proposed for the tonal contour: "greater than" (x>y), "less than" (x<y), "equal to" (x=y), and "non-equal to" (x=/y). Preservation of the four scaling relations is contextualized with respect to different degrees of cohesiveness: nucleus-internal, word-internal and across words. Slope Correspondence, formulated as MATCH-SLOPE constraints, requires preservation of the steepness of the Fo contour across successive tones. Relational correspondence provides a unifying account for a number of seemingly unrelated tone sandhi phenomena in genetically diverse languages, while explaining empirical facts that cannot be adequately expressed within the standard Correspondence Theory of faithfulness plus markedness constraints.by Feng-fan Hsieh.Ph.D

Methods in Contemporary Linguistics

The present volume is a broad overview of methods and methodologies in linguistics, illustrated with examples from concrete research. It collects insights gained from a broad range of linguistic sub-disciplines, ranging from core disciplines to topics in cross-linguistic and language-internal diversity or to contributions towards language, space and society. Given its critical and innovative nature, the volume is a valuable source for students and researchers of a broad range of linguistic interests

Evidentiality, egophoricity and engagement

The expression of knowledge in language (i.e. epistemicity) consists of a number of distinct notions and proposed categories that are only partly related to a well explored forms like epistemic modals. The aim of the volume is therefore to contribute to the ongoing exploration of epistemic marking systems in lesser-documented languages from the Americas, Papua New Guinea, and Central Asia from the perspective of language description and cross-linguistic comparison. As the title of the volume suggests, part of this exploration consists of situating already established notions (such as evidentiality) with the diversity of systems found in individual languages. Epistemic forms that feature in the present volume include ones that signal how speakers claim knowledge based on perceptual-cognitive access (evidentials); the speaker’s involvement as a basis for claiming epistemic authority (egophorics); the distribution of knowledge between the speech-participants where the speaker signals assumptions about the addressee’s knowledge of an event as either shared, or non-shared with the speaker (engagement marking)

Methods in Contemporary Linguistics

The present volume is a broad overview of methods and methodologies in linguistics, illustrated with examples from concrete research. It collects insights gained from a broad range of linguistic sub-disciplines, ranging from core disciplines to topics in cross-linguistic and language-internal diversity or to contributions towards language, space and society. Given its critical and innovative nature, the volume is a valuable source for students and researchers of a broad range of linguistic interests

Evidentiality, egophoricity and engagement

The expression of knowledge in language (i.e. epistemicity) consists of a number of distinct notions and proposed categories that are only partly related to a well explored forms like epistemic modals. The aim of the volume is therefore to contribute to the ongoing exploration of epistemic marking systems in lesser-documented languages from the Americas, Papua New Guinea, and Central Asia from the perspective of language description and cross-linguistic comparison. As the title of the volume suggests, part of this exploration consists of situating already established notions (such as evidentiality) with the diversity of systems found in individual languages. Epistemic forms that feature in the present volume include ones that signal how speakers claim knowledge based on perceptual-cognitive access (evidentials); the speaker’s involvement as a basis for claiming epistemic authority (egophorics); the distribution of knowledge between the speech-participants where the speaker signals assumptions about the addressee’s knowledge of an event as either shared, or non-shared with the speaker (engagement marking)