Phonemic Quantity, Stress, and the Half-Long Vowel in Finnish

An experiment was conducted to compare the duration of the final vowels in Finnish disyllabic words which have short stressed initial syllables -CVCV(V)- with that in words with long stressed initial syllables -CVVCV(V), CVCCV(V), CVVCCV(V). It was found that in the first group the final short and long vowels were systematically longer than in the second group. This is taken to suggest that stress interacts with phonemic quantity: on the initial syllable in the CVCV(V)-words there is a conflict between the phonemic duration of the vowel and the use of duration as a stress cue. This is resolved by spreading the stress-induced duration to the second syllable. Thus even if the domain of stress is a syllable, its realization is not independent of the rest of the phonological structure but it operates in concert with it

Non-native contrasts in Tongan loans

We present three case studies of marginal contrasts in Tongan loans from English, working with data from three speakers. Although Tongan lacks contrasts in stress or in CC vs. CVC sequences, secondary stress in loans is contrastive, and is sensitive to whether a vowel has a correspondent in the English source word; vowel deletion is also sensitive to whether a vowel is epenthetic as compared to the English source; and final vowel length is sensitive to whether the penultimate vowel is epenthetic, and if not, whether it corresponds to a stressed or unstressed vowel in the English source. We provide an analysis in the multilevel model of Boersma (1998) and Boersma & Hamann (2009), and show that the loan patterns can be captured using only constraints that plausibly are needed for native-word phonology, including constraints that reflect perceptual strategies

On Word Stress and Sentence Stress in English

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A UFO in the Finnish Vowel Space: Language Change or Linguistic Uncertainty?

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The phoneme in cognitive phonology: episodic memories of both meaningful and meaningless units?

Cognitive linguistics assumes that languages are symbolic systems that emerge through frequent usage. If we accept the fundamentally symbolic nature of language, the question arises as to whether, in addition to the meaningful units, speakers would form separate memory structures of the meaningless ones as well. For example, would the speech sounds be stored independently of the lexical entries? In the framework of exemplar theory, there are at least two different points of view as to what the basic unit of representation in exemplar-based phonologies is. For one, it is the speech sounds and for the other it is the words. Psycholinguistic studies lend support to episodic memories of words, and neuroscience evidence, also concurring with exemplar-based approaches, suggests that the phonological aspects of the mental lexicon are primarily auditory. In this paper I argue that there are exemplar memories of meaningful units only, and that forming and storing separate exemplar clouds of speech sounds per se is not only unmotivated but problematic as well

Prototypes and hyperspeech: Where are they in the grammar?

If languages are fundamentally symbolic systems, as it is assumed in cognitive linguistics, then it follows that what speakers learn in the course of language acquisition are symbolic systems. It is not unequivocally established that linguistically untrained speakers even have spontaneously emerging awareness of meaningless entities like the phonemes (Liberman et al. 1980, Lotto and Holt 2000, Port and Leary 2005, Read et al. 1986, Välimaa-Blum in press). In this paper, I will argue (i) that knowledge of individual phonemes and their prototypes is metalinguistic, (ii) that the hyperspeech variants of words constitute their prototypes, and (iii) that these should be explicitly represented in the grammar. Lakoff (1993) reintroduces three levels into cognitive phonology - morpheme, word and utterance levels, which I interpret in an exemplar-theoretical framework as representing three kinds of knowledge that speakers must have of the phonology and morpholexicon of their language. The morpheme level contains an exemplar-based lexicon with all the non-automatic allomorphy and word formation principles, the word level articulates the hyperspeech forms of isolated words, and the utterance level spells out the stochastically varying hypospeech shapes of the same in continuous speech. Phonologies only having an abstract 'underlying' level and a phonetic surface have no place for the hyperspeech forms, which, however, are cognitively real to speakers. In cognitive views, the prototypes of phonemes, and hence of words as well, tend to be schematic (Langacker 1987, Mompeán-González 2004, Nathan 1996, 2006, 2007, Taylor 2003), and consequently they are never instantiated as such. I consider it unlikely that a purely abstract, non-instantiated sound shape be the prototype of a category, just as unlikely as it would be for frequency to establish them. If we accept the distinct word and utterance levels, we introduce a specific point in the grammar - the word level - that spells out the hyper-articulated, best exemplars of words

On Intonation in Finnish

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A Feature Geometric Description of Finnish Vowel Harmony Covering Both Loans And Native Words

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Finnish Vowel Harmony as a Prescriptive and Descriptive Rule: An Autosegmental Account

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The English Bare Plural and the Finnish Partitive: Nonbounded Quantity in a Mental Space

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