The Naturalness of Palatalization

Introduction to the special issu

LATVIAN ADAPTATION OF MCARTHUR-BATES COMMUNICATIVE DEVELOPMENT INVENTORIES

The article discusses the methodology and the preliminary results of the research project entitled “Latvian language in Monolingual and Bilingual Acquisition: tools, theories and applications” (LAMBA). The project involves 25 researchers – linguists, educators, psychologists – from five institutions in Latvia and Norway, and focuses on phonological, lexical and morphosyntactic acquisition of Latvian as a native language in monolingual and bilingual settings. One of the main goals of the project is to develop a set of norm-referenced language assessment tools that would allow for accurate and time-efficient evaluation of language development in pre-school children.The article will focus specifically on the Latvian adaptation of MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories – a parental report tool that assesses the development of receptive and productive vocabulary, and certain aspects of grammar. Two CDI forms were adapted in the project: CDI Words and Gestures designed for use with children between 8 and 16 months of age, and CDI Words and Sentences designed for 16- to 36-month old children. Each CDI form contains extensive and language-specific checklists of lexical items, communicative gestures and grammatical constructions

Sensitivity to microvariation in bilingual acquisition: Morphophonological gender cues in Russian heritage language

Previous research on the acquisition of grammatical gender has shown that this property is acquired early in transparent gender systems such as Russian. However, it is not clear to what extent children are sensitive to the assignment cues and to what extent they simply memorize correspondences between frequent lexical items. Furthermore, we do not know if bilingual children are different from monolingual children in this respect. This article reports on a study investigating bilingual children’s sensitivity to gender assignment cues in Russian. A group of 64 bilingual German–Russian children living in Germany participated in the study, as well as 107 monolingual controls in Russia. The elicitation experiments used both real and nonce words, as well as noun phrases with mismatched cues (where the morphophonological shape of the noun cued one gender and the agreement on the modifying adjective another). The results show that both bilinguals and monolinguals are highly sensitive to cues, both to the frequent transparent cues and to more fine-grained gender regularities in situations where there is ambiguity. There is also an age effect, showing that younger children pay more attention to the cue on the noun itself, thus displaying a preference for regular patterns, while older children are more sensitive to gender agreement on other targets

En splyv eller et splyv? Tilordning av grammatisk genus til nonord-substantiv i norsk

Source at: http://ojs.novus.no/index.php/NLT/article/view/2070Tradisjonelt har det norske genussystemet blitt karakterisert som lite transparent. Et viktig spørsmål er om språkbrukere likevel kan være sensitive til visse egenskaper ved substantiver og bruker disse produktivt når de tildeler genus til ukjente ord. I denne artikkelen undersøker vi eksperimentelt språkbrukeres sensitivitet til fonologiske egenskaper som vi har identifisert gjennom korpusundersøkelser. Denne artikkelen formidler resultater fra to studier som begge fokuserer på forholdet mellom hankjønn som standardverdi (default) for genus i norsk og sensitivitet til et substantivs endelse når det gjelder genustilordning. Generelt finner vi at hankjønn står i en særstilling og har en klar posisjon som standardverdi, men samtidig ser vi en effekt av fonologiske egenskaper. I studie 1 avdekker vi dessuten at eksperimentell metode kan ha betydning for resultatene, noe vi derfor kontrollerer for i studie 2

En splyv eller et splyv? Tilordning av grammatisk genus til pseudosubstantiv i norsk

Source at:https://ojs.novus.no/index.php/NLT/article/view/2070Tradisjonelt har det norske genussystemet blitt karakterisert som lite transparent. Et viktig spørsmål er om språkbrukere likevel kan være sensitive til visse egenskaper ved substantiver og bruker disse produktivt når de tildeler genus til ukjente ord. I denne artikkelen undersøker vi eksperimentelt språkbrukeres sensitivitet til fonologiske egenskaper som vi har identifisert gjennom korpusundersøkelser. Denne artikkelen formidler resultater fra to studier som begge fokuserer på forholdet mellom hankjønn som standardverdi (default) for genus i norsk og sensitivitet til et substantivs endelse når det gjelder genustilordning. Generelt finner vi at hankjønn står i en særstilling og har en klar posisjon som standardverdi, men samtidig ser vi en effekt av fonologiske egenskaper. I studie 1 avdekker vi dessuten at eksperimentell metode kan ha betydning for resultatene, noe vi derfor kontrollerer for i studie 2

Palatalization in Latvian

Palatalization is very commonly attested across languages and has sparked considerable interest in fields like linguistic typology, phonetics, and phonology. However, palatalization notoriously exhibits a large degree of diversity, both cross-linguistically and within individual languages, which, on the one hand, precludes a straightforward phonetic explanation, and, on the other hand, poses considerable challenges for formal phonological accounts striving to provide a unified analysis of all processes subsumed under this cover term. In this dissertation, I undertake a systematic investigation of a group of palatalization processes in Modern Standard Latvian, namely assimilatory palatalization, diminutive palatalization, and palatal assimilation in consonant clusters. The intricate Latvian patterns have hitherto received very little attention in the generative phonological literature. The relatively narrow empirical focus of this work made it possible to examine the phenomena in considerable depth and to uncover some regularities and dependencies that have been previously overlooked. I develop a representational and constraint-based analysis of Latvian palatalization. The substance-free approach to a process that has traditionally been regarded as a classic example of a phonetically motivated rule developed in this thesis provides a descriptively adequate, explanatory and formally simple analysis of assimilation patterns that posed considerable challenges for traditional phonetically-driven approaches, while at the same time revealing a complex inter-relation of different phonological and morphological phenomena within a given grammar

Overapplication opacity in phonological acquisition

Phonological opacity is a challenge for parallel OT, which does not allow for intermediate levels of representation. Several modifications of the theory have been proposed over the years to incorporate opacity, all of them falling short of accounting for spontaneous opacity effects in developing grammars. In this paper I demonstrate that if certain independently motivated adjustments are made to the recent OTbased theory of opacity called Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC, see McCarthy 2007), it can successfully deal with spontaneous opacity effects

Consonant-vowel interactions in Modern Standard Latvian: a representational and constraint-based account

In this article I provide a representational and a constraint-based analysis of four interacting palatalization processes operative in Modern Standard Latvian: velar affrication, velar palatalization, yod-palatalization and front vowel raising. The main advantage of the representational account developed here is that it treats all of the mentioned Latvian processes as strictly assimilatory, and at the same time avoids purely stipulative mechanisms characteristic of many feature-geometric approaches to cross-category interactions. The article also contributes to the debate on the role of geometric subsegmental representations in constraint-based computational models, by demonstrating that a principled account of locality, transparency and blocking effects in Latvian palatalization requires the reference to hierarchical autosegmental structures

Perspectives on Palatalization

In this article we provide a discussion of the definition of palatalization as a phonological phenomenon, its crosslinguistic variation, phonetic or functional grounding and phonetic (un)naturalness of palatalization, and theoretical approaches to palatalization patterns. After providing this background to the collection of articles in this special issue of Glossa we will give an overview of the contributions collected here

What Latvian tells us about strong PCC effects

The nature of Person Case Constraints (PCC) in natural languages is among the most debated issues in current linguistic research. In this article we consider an instance of strong PCC attested in the Latvian debitive construction, whereby a 1st or 2nd person internal argument cannot appear in the nominative in the presence of a dative debitor. We argue that the Latvian facts support an analysis of strong PCC effects along the lines of Sigurðsson’s (2002, 2004) proposal that PCC is due to a dative intervention effect inside a multiheaded approach to pronominal licensing. We preliminarily extend the analysis to other instances of strong PCC effects, showing that Sigurðsson’s theory is a good candidate to unify strong PCC effects under a common treatmen