The diachrony of Mapudungun stress assignment

Stress assignment is one of the most widely-known and controversial aspects of present-day Mapudungun (aka Araucanian) phonology. Here, the diachrony of the phenomenon is explored based on the available written record spanning 1606–1936. Having surveyed these sparse but suggestive data, and contrasted them with present-day evidence, I suggest four distinct stages of development. Ultimately, I go on to argue that Mapudungun has undergone changes both to the morphological and metrical domains which determine stress assignment. At the level of the morphology, stress appears to have changed from marking the edge of verbal roots, to marking the edge of stems. In terms of metrical units, the apparent lack of weight-sensitivity in the earliest stages of the language is replaced by a decidedly weight-sensitive system towards the end. Finally, I argue that stress assignment in Mapudungun is subordinate to morpho-phonological transparency both synchronically and diachronically, allowing the position of stress to vary in order to highlight the morphology

'Fake' gemination in suffixed words and compounds in English and German

In languages with an underlying consonantal length contrast, the most salient acoustic cue differentiating singletons and geminates is duration of closure. When concatenation of identical phonemes through affixation or compounding produces “fake” geminates, these may or may not be realized phonetically as true geminates. English and German no longer have a productive length contrast in consonants, but do allow sequences of identical consonants in certain morphological contexts, e.g., suffixation (green-ness; zahl-los “countless”) or compounding (pine nut; Schul-leiter “headmaster”). The question is whether such concatenated sequences are produced as geminates and realized acoustically with longer closure duration, and whether this holds in both languages. This issue is investigated here by analyzing the acoustics of native speakers reading suffixed and compound words containing both fake geminate and non-geminate consonants in similar phonological environments. Results indicate that the closure duration is consistently nearly twice as long for fake geminates across conditions. In addition, voice onset time is proportionally longer for fake geminates in English while vowel duration shows few significant differences (in German sonorants only). These results suggest that English and German speakers articulate fake geminates with acoustic characteristics similar to those found in languages with an underlying length contrast, despite no longer displaying the contrast morpheme-internally

Charting the rise and demise of a phonotactically motivated change in Scots

Although Old English [f] and [v] are represented unambiguously in Older Scots orthography by <f> and <v> (or <u>) in initial and morpheme-internal position, in morpheme-final position <f> and <v>/<u> appear to be used interchangeably for both of these Old English sounds. As a result, there is often a mismatch between the spellings and the etymologically expected consonant. This paper explores these spellings using a substantial database of Older Scots texts, which have been grapho-phonologically parsed as part of the From Inglis to Scots (FITS) project. Three explanations are explored for this apparent mismatch: (1) it was a spelling-only change; (2) there was a near merger of /f/ and /v/ in Older Scots; (3) final [v] devoiced in (pre-)Older Scots but this has subsequently been reversed. A close analysis of the data suggests that the Old English phonotactic constraint against final voiced fricatives survived into the pre-Literary Scots period, leading to automatic devoicing of any fricative that appeared in word-final position (a version of Hypothesis 3), and this, interacting with final schwa loss, gave rise to the complex patterns of variation we see in the Older Scots data. Thus, the devoicing of [v] in final position was not just a phonetically natural sound change, but also one driven by a pre-existing phonotactic constraint in the language. This paper provides evidence for the active role of phonotactic constraints in the development of sound changes, suggesting that phonotactic constraints are not necessarily at the mercy of the changes which conflict with them, but can be involved in the direction of sound change themselves

Tracing L-­vocalisation in early Scots

This paper provides novel evidence for the frequency and spatio-temporal distribution of the earliest instances of Scots L-vocalisation. This so-called “characteristic Scots change” (McClure 1994: 48) entails the loss of coda-/l/ following back vowels, with concomitant vocalic lengthening or diphthongisation (e.g. OE healf > OSc hawff; OE bolster > OSc bouster; OE full > OSc fow, cf. Johnston 1997: 90). Using data from the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS), spanning 1380-1500, we reassess the claims for the emergence of L-vocalisation in the early 15th century (Aitken & Macafee 2002: 101-4) and for its completion by the beginning of the 16th (cf. Stuart-Smith et al. 2006, Bann & Corbett, 2015). Based on attestations of <l>-less forms and reverse spellings, we map the spread of <l>-loss over time and space. Emphasis is placed on the relative chronologies and lexical and geographic distributions of the change in different phonological contexts, including morpheme-final, pre-labial, pre-velar and (more lexically sporadic) pre-alveolar. Particular attention is also paid to the under-explored /l/~Ø alternation in borrowed items from (Norman) French (cf. realme~reaume ‘realm’) and their potential influence on the development of coda-/l/ in Scots. The results show low-level presence of the phenomenon throughout our corpus, but no signs of a categorical change in any of the target contexts