Expressive sibilant retraction in North Norwegian : Morpheme or ‘spoken gesture’?

North Norwegian has a contrast between /s/ and /ʂ/ that is neutralized in word-initial position before a consonant, and an optional process of Expressive Sibilant Retraction (ESR), which changes /s/ to [ʂ] in precisely the environment where the contrast is neutralized (Broch 1927). ESR appears ambiguous between a word formation process and a spoken gesture (Okrent 2002; Perlman et al. 2015). On the one hand, ESR exploits givens of phonological structure. On the other, treating it as a morphological process entails claiming that the spell-out of certain (“expressive”) morphemes may take place after phonological processes have applied, or that the realization of these morphemes takes precedence to phonological constraints. I argue that ESR is a communicative (i.e. non-linguistic, or post-linguistic) spoken gesture that nonetheless exploits the suspension of phonological generalizations in a way that directs attention to its iconic function. I describe the varied interpretations that ESR has depending on whether it indexes an action/event, object, or state/property, and propose that these share a common semantic core. This gesture-based account of ESR is offered as a possible model for “expressive phonology” (e.g. Diffloth 1979) in other languages.publishedVersio

The Preconceptual Basis of Noun Class (Gender)

Noun class is widely seen as “standing out” from other morphosyntactic categories in having a basis in ontological beliefs, or a ‘semantic core’. The consequence of this view is that noun classes in natural languages frequently do not cohere semantically. Here I motivate an aspectual alternative according to which noun class is grounded in low-level cognitive processes including the detection of agency and sex-related cues (including shape/size) and ‘mode’ of attention. This suggests a way of bringing noun class more into line with the perspectivizing contribution of morphosyntactic features in general

Medial catalexis in Sir Thomas Wyatt’s iambic pentameter

There is a reasonable scholarly consensus that the long (“heroic”) line of Sir Thomas Wyatt is an iambic pentameter. However, a significant number of his long lines are apparently syllabically hypometrical, calling into question this interpretation. The doubt is further compounded by Wyatt’s nontrivial use of phrase-medial inversions. I argue that it is nonetheless possible to infer an iambic pentameter intention behind Wyatt’s syllabically hypometrical lines, which can be ‘repaired’ by medial catalexis. Syllabically canonical lines are known to favour major prosodic breaks (Intonational Phrase boundaries) between the second and third foot and, to some extent, between the third and fourth. On the assumption that medial catalexis exploits the natural pauses that occur at the boundaries between Intonational Phrases, what emerges is a significant preference for catalexis to target the weak position of the third verse foot (half-line boundary), followed by the fourth (immediately following the verse-foot adjunct of the second half-line). The finding opens up further possibilities for understanding Wyatt’s other licences, and linguistically informed literary criticism of his verse. The final part of the paper offers some speculations as to the nature of medial catalexis and how it can be approached within a linguistically informed framework compatible with generative metrics

Stem Alternations in the Passive in Sierra Miwok

Journal home page at http://www.cascadilla.com/wccfl.html.Central Sierra Miwok (CSM; Freeland1951) is described as having root-and-template morphology (for a recent approach and further references, see Downing 2006). There are four stem forms, referred to by number, and identified by their place in the conjugational paradigms. The exact form of each stem depends on the phonological shape of the root, specifically whether it contains two or three consonants and whether it is vowel- or consonant-final

Cryptosonorants and the misapplication of voicing assimilation in Biaspectual Phonology

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The fundamental left-right asymmetry in the Germanic verb cluster

Cinque (2005, 2009, 2014a) observes that there is an asymmetry in the possible ordering of dependents of a lexical head before versus after the head. A reflection on some of the concepts needed to develop Cinque’s ideas into a theory of neutral word order reveals that dependents need to be treated separately by class. The resulting system is applied to the problem of word order in the Germanic verb cluster. It is shown that there is an extremely close match between theoretically derived expectations for clusters made up of auxiliaries, modals, causative ‘let’, a main verb, and verbal particles. The facts point to the action of Cinque’s fundamental left-right asymmetry in language in the realm of the verb cluster. At the same time, not all verb clusters fall under Cinque’s generalization, which, therefore, argues against treating all cases of restructuring uniformly

The lexicon has its grammar, which the grammar knows nothing of. Marginal contrast and phonological theory

Marginal phonemes exploit systemically latent possibilities of contrast but have unusual lexical distributions characterized by clustering according to expressive function or morphological structure. This paper discusses examples of marginal contrast from several languages and shows that, despite initial appearances, it is not possible to confine marginally contrasting items to well-defined strata, lexical or morphological. Marginal phonemes are structure preserving, and turn up, however infrequently, in core and non-derived environments. Explanations for clustering must accordingly be sought outside grammatical theory