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

Modern Greek Accentuation

Ιn this paper Ι claim that Greek is a lexical accent system and Ι introduce a theoretical framework for its accentual analysis. Ιn systems of this type morphemes have to be specified in the lexicon as accented οr unaccented. Words composed of unaccented morphemes are stressed by the default rule. Ιn the presence of more than one mark within a word, the lexical specification of the stem prevails

Markedness Hierarchies vs. Positional Faithfulness and the Role of Multiple Grammars in the Acquisition of Greek

"Child language research investigates how language development proceeds. In pursuing this question, many researchers argued that markedness constraints are initially more prominent in the emerging grammar since they are active in early word segmentation tasks