Morphological Complexity and Prosodic Minimality

It is widely attested, cross-linguistically, for both words and prosodic morphemes to be required to be minimally bimoraic or disyllabic. Work since McCarthy and Prince (1986) argues that these minimality effects fall out from the Prosodic Hierarchy. Requiring the relevant morpheme to be a Prosodic Word and dominate a stress Foot automatically also imposes a two mora or two syllable minimality requirement. In this paper I show, based on a reanalysis of reduplication in Axininca Campa, that this Prosodic Hierarchy-based theory of minimality is inadequate. I argue instead that morphological minimality conditions are better explained as a form of Head-Dependent Asymmetry (Dresher and van der Hulst 1998). Head morphemes are enhanced by requiring more complex prosodic structure, mirroring their more complex morphological structure. This alternative approach not only provides a uniform account of minimality effects holding for Axininca Campa reduplication, it also solves the problems raised by McCarthy and Prince's (1993, 1995) analysis of the data

Satisfying minimality in Ndebele

In this paper, I discuss four different verb forms in Ndebele (a Nguni Bantu language spoken mainly in Zimbabwe) - the imperative, reduplicated, future and participial. I show that while all four are subject to minimality restrictions, minimality is satisfied differently in each of these morphological contexts. To account for this, I argue that in Ndebele (as in other Bantu languages) Word and RED are not the only constituents which must satisfy minimality: the Stem is also subject to minimality conditions in some morphological contexts. This paper, then, provides additional arguments for the proposal that Phonological Word is not the only sub-lexical morpho-prosodic constituent. Further, I argue that, although Word, RED and Stern are all subject to the same minimality constraint – they must all be minimally bisyllabic - this does not follow from a single 'generalized' constraint. Instead, I argue, contra recent work within Generalized Template Theory (see, e.g., McCarthy & Prince 1994, 1995a, 1999; Urbanezyk 1995, 1996; and Walker 2000; etc.) that a distinct minimality constraint must be formalized for each of these morpho-prosodic constituents

INFECTIOUS DISEASES ARE SLEEPING MONSTERS: Conventional and culturally adapted new metaphors in a corpus of abstracts on immunology

In this paper we examine the role played by metaphor in a corpus of sixty abstracts on immunology from Scientific American. We focus on the distinction between conventional metaphors and culturally adapted new metaphors and discuss the role played by metaphor choice in the communicative purposes of the abstracts and their register features. We argue that one of the main strategies used to attract the reader‘s attention is the combination of highly conventionalized metaphors, which occur more frequently in the corpus, together with what we call “culturally adapted new metaphors”, which display different degrees of creativity and are less frequent in the corpus. Conventional metaphors typically reinforce the world view shared by the scientific community and introduce basic ideas on the subject of immunology. Culturally adapted new metaphors include a cline from slightly new perspectives of conventional models, to highly creative uses of metaphor. Culturally adapted new metaphors appeal primarily to a general readership and not to the scientific community, as they tap human emotions and mythic constructions. These play a crucial role in the abstracts, as they contribute to persuasive and didactic communicative functions in the text

Apostolic Religious: Lay Ecclesial Ministers?

Thesis advisor: Richard LennanThesis advisor: Margaret GuiderThesis (STL) — Boston College, 2018.Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry.Discipline: Sacred Theology

Jita Glide Epenthesis and the Maximality Principle

Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on African Language Structures (1991), pp. 74-8

Discourse, Culture and Cognition: The Role of Negation in the Creation of Coherence in Press and Advertising Discourse

Este artículo analiza el papel de la negación en la creación de la coherencia discursiva, entendida como un proceso en el que se crea un mundo textual, en artículos argumentativos y en anuncios publicitarios de prensa en inglés y español. La negación contribuye a la creación de la coherencia al modificar información de proposiciones que se encuentran el discurso o evocada por estas proposiciones, siendo fundamental la evocación de esquemas cognitivos. Proponemos una clasificación de las funciones de la negación en la que se tienen en cuenta los aspectos culturales, cognitivos y textuales que determinan la elección del enunciado negativo.The aim of this article is to argue that negation plays a crucial role in the creation of discourse coherence understood as a process which involves the creation of a textual world. Negation modifies information present in discourse or evoked from propositions in discourse, thus performing different discourse functions in which frame knowledge plays a crucial role. A proposal is put forward for a classification of the cognitive-discourse functions of negative propositions in argumentative discourse with illustrations from extracts from opinion articles, headlines and advertisements in Spanish and British newspapers

Morphological Correspondence in Kinande Reduplication

Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Structure (1997

Text world creation in advertising discourse

This article explores the way in which text worlds are created in advertising discourse by analysing linguistic choices and features of context which are crucial in the determination of specific relations between sender(s) and target audience(s), in particular, deixis and frame knowledge. The argument is that a text world model is particularly adequate for the description of the way in which advertising discourse is processed in an active, dynamic, context-dependent way. In this process, addressees reconstruct the world projected in the discourse according to their own cultural and personal knowledge from the linguistic and visual clues provided in the advertisement

A discourse-pragmatic approach to negation in J. Heller's "Catch-22"

La tesis es un estudio de las funciones pragmático- discursivas de la negación en la novela catch-22, de j. Heller. El análisis lingüístico de la negación se sitúa en el marco teórico mas amplio de la estilística lingüística. Se parte de una revisión de las teorías sobre la negación, lo que constituye la parte teórica de la tesis, y a continuación se realiza un análisis cualitativo y cuantitativo del corpus. El principal objetivo del estudio es el de verificar las hipótesis que se plantean en la introducción; según estas, la negación en el corpus es un rasgo marcado que contribuye a la creación de un patrón de desviación discursiva que puede percibirse como desfamiliarizador por parte de un lector. Este carácter marcado se debe fundamentalmente a las características idiosincráticas de la negación como fenómeno discursivo, y solo de forma menos significativa a la alta frecuencia de las palabras negativas en el corpu