62 research outputs found
Kayardild Morphology, Phonology and Morphosyntax
Kayardild possesses one of, if not the, most exuberant systems of morphological concord known to linguists, and a phonological system which is intricately sensitive to its morphology. This dissertation provides a comprehensive description of the phonology of Kayardild, an investigation of its phonetics, its intonation, and a formal analysis of its inflectional morphology. A key component of the latter is the existence of a ‘morphomic’ level of representation intermediate between morphosyntactic features and underlying phonological forms.
Chapter 2 introduces the segmental inventory of Kayardild, the phonetic realisations of surface segments, and their phonotactics. Chapter 3 provides an introduction to the empirical facts of Kayardild word structure, outlining the kinds of morphs of which words are composed, their formal shapes and their combinations. Chapter 4 treats the segmental phonology of Kayardild. After a survey of the mappings between underlying and (lexical) surface forms, the primary topic is the interaction of the phonology with morphology, although major generalisations identifiable in the phonology itself are also identified and discussed. Chapter 5 examines Kayardild stress, and presents a constraint based analysis, before turning to an empirical and analytical discussion of intonation. Chapter 6, on the syntax and morphosyntax of Kayardild, is most substantial chapter of the dissertation. In association with the examination of a large corpus of new and newly collated data, mutually compatible analyses of the syntax and morphosyntactic features of Kayardild are built up and compared against less favourable alternatives. A critical review of Evans’ (1995a) analysis of similar phenomena is also provided. Chapter 7 turns to the realisational morphology — the component of the grammar which ties the morphosyntax to the phonology, by realising morphosyntactic features structures as morphomic representations, then morphomic representations as underlying phonological representations. A formalism is proposed in order to express these mappings within a constraint based grammar.
In addition to enriching our understanding of Kayardild, the dissertation presents data and analyses which will be of interest for theories of the interface between morphology on the one hand and phonology and syntax on the other, as well as for morphological and phonological theory more narrowly
Re-evaluating phoneme frequencies
Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic
variables that they affect. Consequently, a secure understanding of a
variable's distribution can hold a key to understanding the forces that have
causally shaped it. A storied distribution in linguistics has been Zipf's law,
a kind of power law. In the wake of a major debate in the sciences around
power-law hypotheses and the unreliability of earlier methods of evaluating
them, here we re-evaluate the distributions claimed to characterize phoneme
frequencies. We infer the fit of power laws and three alternative distributions
to 166 Australian languages, using a maximum likelihood framework. We find
evidence supporting earlier results, but also nuancing them and increasing our
understanding of them. Most notably, phonemic inventories appear to have a
Zipfian-like frequency structure among their most-frequent members (though
perhaps also a lognormal structure) but a geometric (or exponential) structure
among the least-frequent. We compare these new insights the kinds of causal
processes that affect the evolution of phonemic inventories over time, and
identify a potential account for why, despite there being an important role for
phonetic substance in phonemic change, we could still expect inventories with
highly diverse phonetic content to share similar distributions of phoneme
frequencies. We conclude with priorities for future work in this promising
program of research.Comment: 29pp (3 figures, 3 tables). This article has been provisionally
accepted for publication (Frontiers in Psychology, Language Sciences).
Supplementary information, data and code available at
http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.388621
Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics
Phylogenetic methods have broad potential in linguistics beyond tree
inference. Here, we show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of
gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds of linguistic data--in this
instance, statistical phonotactics. We extract phonotactic data from 111
Pama-Nyungan vocabularies and apply tests for phylogenetic signal, quantifying
the degree to which the data reflect phylogenetic history. We test three
datasets: (1) binary variables recording the presence or absence of biphones
(two-segment sequences) in a lexicon (2) frequencies of transitions between
segments, and (3) frequencies of transitions between natural sound classes.
Australian languages have been characterized as having a high degree of
phonotactic homogeneity. Nevertheless, we detect phylogenetic signal in all
datasets. Phylogenetic signal is greater in finer-grained frequency data than
in binary data, and greatest in natural-class-based data. These results
demonstrate the viability of employing a new source of readily extractable data
in historical and comparative linguistics.Comment: Main text: 32 pages, 17 figures, 1 table. Supplementary Information:
17 pages, 1 figure. Code and data available at
http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3936353. This article is in review but not yet
accepted for publication in a journa
High-Definition Phonotactics Reflect Linguistic Pasts
Typological datasets for quantitative historicallinguistic
inquiry are growing in breadth, but a challenge is also
to increase their depth, since advanced methods often ideally
require many hundreds of traits per language. Using biphone
transition probabilities from phonemicized vocabulary data, we
extract several hundred high-definition phonotactic traits per
language, for 17 languages in the Ngumpin-Yapa and Yolngu
subgroups of the Pama-Nyungan family, Australia. We detect
phylogenetic signal at a significant level (p < 0.001 for both
subgroups), measured against a reference phylogeny inferred
from basic vocabulary cognacy data. This contrasts with simpler,
binary coding of biphones’ occurrence, which provides
insufficient detail for the detection of phylogenetic signal. Thus,
we demonstrate the viability of a new method in quantitative
historical linguistics, and emphasize the inferential power to be
harnessed from high-definition, trait-rich datasets for
comparative research
On looking into words (and beyond): Structures, Relations, Analyses
On Looking into Words is a wide-ranging volume spanning current research into word structure and morphology, with a focus on historical linguistics and linguistic theory. The papers are offered as a tribute to Stephen R. Anderson, the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics at Yale, who is retiring at the end of the 2016-2017 academic year. The contributors are friends, colleagues, and former students of Professor Anderson, all important contributors to linguistics in their own right. As is typical for such volumes, the contributions span a variety of topics relating to the interests of the honorand. In this case, the central contributions that Anderson has made to so many areas of linguistics and cognitive science, drawing on synchronic and diachronic phenomena in diverse linguistic systems, are represented through the papers in the volume.
The 26 papers that constitute this volume are unified by their discussion of the interplay between synchrony and diachrony, theory and empirical results, and the role of diachronic evidence in understanding the nature of language. Central concerns of the volume include morphological gaps, learnability, increases and declines in productivity, and the interaction of different components of the grammar. The papers deal with a range of linked synchronic and diachronic topics in phonology, morphology, and syntax (in particular, cliticization), and their implications for linguistic theory
On looking into words (and beyond): Structures, Relations, Analyses
On Looking into Words is a wide-ranging volume spanning current research into word structure and morphology, with a focus on historical linguistics and linguistic theory. The papers are offered as a tribute to Stephen R. Anderson, the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics at Yale, who is retiring at the end of the 2016-2017 academic year. The contributors are friends, colleagues, and former students of Professor Anderson, all important contributors to linguistics in their own right. As is typical for such volumes, the contributions span a variety of topics relating to the interests of the honorand. In this case, the central contributions that Anderson has made to so many areas of linguistics and cognitive science, drawing on synchronic and diachronic phenomena in diverse linguistic systems, are represented through the papers in the volume.
The 26 papers that constitute this volume are unified by their discussion of the interplay between synchrony and diachrony, theory and empirical results, and the role of diachronic evidence in understanding the nature of language. Central concerns of the volume include morphological gaps, learnability, increases and declines in productivity, and the interaction of different components of the grammar. The papers deal with a range of linked synchronic and diachronic topics in phonology, morphology, and syntax (in particular, cliticization), and their implications for linguistic theory
On looking into words (and beyond): Structures, Relations, Analyses
On Looking into Words is a wide-ranging volume spanning current research into word structure and morphology, with a focus on historical linguistics and linguistic theory. The papers are offered as a tribute to Stephen R. Anderson, the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics at Yale, who is retiring at the end of the 2016-2017 academic year. The contributors are friends, colleagues, and former students of Professor Anderson, all important contributors to linguistics in their own right. As is typical for such volumes, the contributions span a variety of topics relating to the interests of the honorand. In this case, the central contributions that Anderson has made to so many areas of linguistics and cognitive science, drawing on synchronic and diachronic phenomena in diverse linguistic systems, are represented through the papers in the volume.
The 26 papers that constitute this volume are unified by their discussion of the interplay between synchrony and diachrony, theory and empirical results, and the role of diachronic evidence in understanding the nature of language. Central concerns of the volume include morphological gaps, learnability, increases and declines in productivity, and the interaction of different components of the grammar. The papers deal with a range of linked synchronic and diachronic topics in phonology, morphology, and syntax (in particular, cliticization), and their implications for linguistic theory
On looking into words (and beyond): Structures, Relations, Analyses
On Looking into Words is a wide-ranging volume spanning current research into word structure and morphology, with a focus on historical linguistics and linguistic theory. The papers are offered as a tribute to Stephen R. Anderson, the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics at Yale, who is retiring at the end of the 2016-2017 academic year. The contributors are friends, colleagues, and former students of Professor Anderson, all important contributors to linguistics in their own right. As is typical for such volumes, the contributions span a variety of topics relating to the interests of the honorand. In this case, the central contributions that Anderson has made to so many areas of linguistics and cognitive science, drawing on synchronic and diachronic phenomena in diverse linguistic systems, are represented through the papers in the volume.
The 26 papers that constitute this volume are unified by their discussion of the interplay between synchrony and diachrony, theory and empirical results, and the role of diachronic evidence in understanding the nature of language. Central concerns of the volume include morphological gaps, learnability, increases and declines in productivity, and the interaction of different components of the grammar. The papers deal with a range of linked synchronic and diachronic topics in phonology, morphology, and syntax (in particular, cliticization), and their implications for linguistic theory
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