A Gradient Harmonic Grammar Account of Nasals in Extended Phonological Words

The article aims at contributing to the long-standing research on the prosodic organization of linguistic elements and the criteria used for identifying prosodic structures. Our focus is on final coronal nasals in function words in Greek and the variability in their patterns of realization before lexical words. Certain nasals coalesce before stops and delete before fricatives, whereas others do not. We propose that this split in the behavior of nasals does not pertain to item-specific prosody because the relevant strings are uniformly prosodified into an extended phonological word (Itô & Mester 2007, 2009). It rather stems from the contrastive activity level of nasals in underlying forms in the spirit of Smolensky & Goldrick's (2016) Gradient Symbolic Representations; nasals with lower activity coalesce and delete in the respective phonological environments, whereas those with higher activity do not. We show that the proposed analysis captures certain gradient effects that alternative analyses cannot account for.Aquest article pretén contribuir a la investigació sobre l'organització prosòdica dels elements lingüístics i els criteris que es fan servir per identificar les estructures prosòdiques. Ens centrem en l'estudi de les nasals coronals finals en paraules funcionals en grec i la seva variabilitat en els patrons de realització davant de paraules lèxiques. Algunes nasals pateixen un procés de coalescència davant d'oclusives i s'elideixen davant de fricatives, mentre que d'altres no ho fan. Proposem que aquest doble comportament observat en les nasals no pertany a principis prosòdics dependents dels ítems en qüestió perquè totes aquestes estructures es prosodifiquen en una paraula fonològica estesa (recursiva) (Itô & Mester 2007, 2009). Proposem que la divergència es deu a nivells d'activitat diferents associats a les formes subjacents de les nasals, seguint la teoria de les representacions simbòliques gradients de Smolensky & Goldrick (2016); les nasals associades amb un nivell baix d'activitat pateixen coalescència i s'elideixen en el context fonològic respectiu; mentre que les nasals amb un nivell d'activitat més alt no ho fan. Mostrem que l'anàlisi proposada captura certs efectes gradients que anàlisis alternatives no poden explicar

Harmony as a cue for the transition from fusion to agglutination

We examine a vowel assimilation process attested in a group of Asia Minor Greek dialects which superficially looks like vowel harmony. We propose, however, that vowel assimilation is actually a feature spreading process actualizing a reanalysis in the nominal inflection, which was facilitated by the language contact with Turkish. More specifically, it signals a ‘new’ stem formation, in which the theme vowel of the ending or the whole ending loses its status as a constituent and incorporates into the stem. Vowel assimilation is not attested in agglutinative inflection because in this case the ‘new’ status of the theme vowel or of the old ending as part of the stem is morphologically transparent

Constructing pseudowords for experimental research: Problems and solutions

We present the methodology for the construction of pseudowords for an experiment that explores the Greek listeners’ perception of nominal stress. Our goal was, first, to construct pseudonouns that sound native enough to the native speakers’ ears and, second, to make the speakers’ ‘familiarity intuition’ measurable. For this purpose, we created a noun-only version of the Clean Corpus/ILSP, named NClean. We also set a number of variables to evaluate the phonotactic familiarity of the constructed pseudonouns relative to the mean phonotactic characteristics of the NClean nouns. Pseudonouns that complied to the selected phonotactic criteria qualified as experimental items

The relationship between language production and verbal short-term memory: The role of stress grouping

This study investigates the influence of stress grouping on verbal short-term memory (STM). English speakers show a preference to combine syllables into trochaic groups, both lexically and in continuous speech. In two serial recall experiments, auditory lists of nonsense syllables were presented with either trochaic (STRONG-weak) or iambic (weak-STRONG) stress patterns, or in monotone. The acoustic correlates that carry stress were also manipulated in order to examine the relationship between input and output processes during recall. In Experiment 1, stressed and unstressed syllables differed in intensity and pitch but were matched for spoken duration. Significantly more syllables were recalled in the trochaic stress pattern condition than in the iambic and monotone conditions, which did not differ. In Experiment 2, spoken duration and pitch were manipulated but intensity was held constant. No effects of stress grouping were observed, suggesting that intensity is a critical acoustic factor for trochaic grouping. Acoustic analyses demonstrated that speech output was not identical to the auditory input, but that participants generated correct stress patterns by manipulating acoustic correlates in the same way in both experiments. These data challenge the idea of a language-independent STM store and support the notion of separable phonological input and output processes

Feature inheritance, vP phases and the information structure of small clauses

In this paper we explore the interaction of discourse properties in the syntax of small clauses from a cross-linguistic perspective. In line with Chomsky’s (2007, 2008) idea that phasal properties should be extended to all phases, we argue for a strict parallelism between C-T and v-V, suggesting that v enters the derivation with both agreement and discourse features. These features may be inherited by V depending on the relevant language. Building on Miyagawa (2010) and Jim enez-Fern andez (2010), we claim that in Spanish and Greek, in contrast with English, both agreement and discourse features are inherited by V. This strategy accounts for the different order rearrangements detected in small clauses. The proposal can easily be extended to other languages such as Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Russian and Ukrainian, as opposed to French, Norwegian, Afrikaans and Germa

Headmost Accent Wins: Head Dominance and Ideal Prosodic Form in Lexical Accent Systems

'Headmost Accent Wins' investigates the accentuation of lexical accent systems within the framework of Optimality Theory. The central claims of the book are: first, words with a lexical accent have unpredictable stress but predictable prosodic shape, and second, prosodic structure is built on the basis of morphological structure. A lexical accent is an autosegmental feature which is phonetically realized as stress or pitch according to language-specific constraints. Even though the specification of accents is free and unrestricted, independent prosodic constraints on word form limit their distribution. As a result, accented words have a strictly binary prosodic structure. Freedom of the input, on the one hand, and constraint ranking on the other derive a confined set of 'ideal' prosodic forms for words with lexical accents. Conflicts among lexical accents for prominence are resolved by morphology. The prosody-morphology interface centers around the principle of prosodic compositionality. It is articulated in terms of a 'theory of head dominance', which states that the accent of the morphological head of the word prevails over other accents. The theory of head dominance is tested in a number of morphological constructions in languages with different types of morphology (i.e. fusional, polysynthetic). In addition, it is shown that head dominance voids the need for the complex derivational machinery of cyclic and non-cyclic levels. Moreover, it directly derives the effects of the metaconstraint ROOTFAITH >> SUFFIXFAITH (McCarthy & Prince 1995) and, more importantly, it accounts for the counter examples to this metaconstraint. This book is of interest to metrical phonologists, linguists working on the prosody-morphology interface and researchers interested in Greek, Russian and the Salish languages.Ph.D.Title and text in English; some preliminary text in Dutch.Copyright 1999 by Anthi Revithiadou