Long-Distance Voicing Agreement: An Evolutionary Perspective

Phenomena involving the long-distance assimilation of consonants (e.g., Ineseño /s-api-to-it / → [apitolit], Yaka /-mtuk-idi / → [-mtuk-ini]) have come under renewed scrutiny in recent years.1 Most notably, it has been argued that such phenomena involve not feature spreading but featural agreement, and ar

Long-Distance Voicing Agreement: An Evolutionary Perspective

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Anti-Homophony Effects in Dakelh (Carrier) Valence Morphology

In Dakelh (Carrier), as in many other Athapaskan languages, valence prefixes and "inner subject" prefixes interact in a complex pattern involving a combination of consonant deletion and/or fusion and, in certain conditions, what looks like epenthesis. In this paper we investigate this apparent epenthesis effect, which is otherwise unexpected in this environment in Dakelh and is problematic in several aspects (Gessner 2003). We propose that the epenthesis should be understood as an anti-homophony effect (Crosswhite 1999, Blevins 2004a, b) serving to systematically maintain a surface distinction between paradigmatically related forms differing in valence. We demonstrate how the anti-homophony effect is best understood in a diachronic-evolutionary context rather than a synchronicphonological one: "epenthesis" is really the blocking of syncope (as a regular historical sound change). The account constitutes a striking parallel to the explanation of so-called antigemination effects as the result of syncope blocking through homophony avoidance, as proposed by Blevins (2004a, b)

Long-Distance Phonotactics as Tier-Based Strictly 2-Local Languages

This paper shows that the properties of locality observed for patterns of long-distance consonant agreement and disagreement belong to a well-defined and relatively simple class of subregular formal languages (stringsets) called the Tier-based Strictly 2-Local languages, and argues that analyzing them as such has desirable theoretical implications. Specifically, treating the two elements of a long-distance dependency as adjacent segments on the computationally defined notion of a tier allows for a unified account of locality that necessarily extends to the cross-linguistically variable behavior of neutral segments (transparency and blocking). This result is significant in light of the long-standing and persistent problems that long-distance dependencies have raised for phonological theory, with current approaches still predicting several pathological patterns that have little or no empirical support

Editors' Note

This note provides some information and statistics about the AMP 2015 conference from which these papers originated, and acknowledges the support and funding received by the conference organizers and editors of this volume