Proceedings Published by the LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
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Foot structure enables strict locality in phonological processes
Get PDFThe metrical foot has a long pedigree as a theoretical device in generative phonology (Liberman & Prince, 1977; Halle & Vergnaud, 1978; Selkirk, 1980; Hammond, 1984; Halle & Vergnaud, 1987; Idsardi, 1992; Hayes, 1995). While the motivations for foot structure are typically studied in terms of stress, this paper provides evidence from the principles of formal language theory (Chomsky, 1956; Hopcroft & Ullman, 1979) for foot-based analyses of non-stress processes. Though use of foot structure in these analyses is not novel (see Gonzalez (2018) for an overview) this paper contributes a precise characterization of what is at stake in terms of the computation of these processes when foot structure is present versus when it is not. This formal computational analysis indicates that feet have measurable implications for the predicted typology of these patterns. Thus, support is provided for a specific substantive phonological proposal based on the well-defined measures of complexity that formal language theory offers.
Portuguese Has Two Underlying Rhotics: Evidence from Lisbon and Carioca Varieties
Get PDF Like many Romance languages, Portuguese has a weak-r (tap) and a strong-R (posterior fricative). At the surface level, these two rhotics are only contrastive between vowels, whereas they are neutralized in other positions. How the Portuguese rhotics are represented at the underlying level is still a matter of debate. Competing analyses differ with respect to whether the Portuguese word-initial strong-R is derived by a position-sensitive rule (one-rhotic analysis) or stems from its underlying form faithfully (two-rhotic account). In the current study, we designed a transformational language game to probe the underlying nature of this initial rhotic. The participants were asked to name objects represented in pictures and to add a stressed prefix [ˈpa] whenever an object was presented in black-and-white. 8 native speakers from Lisbon and 8 from Rio de Janeiro participated in the game. In general ,participants consistently produced a posterior fricative after prefixation. These data show that the Portuguese word-initial strong-R is not a result of rule application, suggesting that Portuguese has two underlying rhotics
Phonotactics of Gender in Mandarin Given Names: Patterns and Constraints
Get PDFIn this paper, we investigate the phonotactic patterns that correlate with gender in given names for Mandarin Chinese, a language that is phonotactically quite different from English. We find that many of the phonological predictors for gender in English trend in the same direction for Mandarin. We also compare the phonotactic grammars of Mandarin female and male given names obtained from Maximum-Entropy phonotactic learning models, and find that certain low acoustic frequency sounds that imply largeness according to the Frequency-Code Hypothesis are penalized for female names, while higher acoustic frequency sounds that imply smallness according to the Frequency-Code Hypothesis are not marked in the grammar for male names
Long Distance Bantu Nasal Agreement: Harmony or Allomorphy
Get PDFLong-distance nasal agreement (LDNA) is a process where consonants appear to agree in nasality across intervening “neutral” segments. This paper sets out to examine LDNA in Bantu languages, which has been previously analyzed as consonant harmony. It argues LDNA can be analyzed as a case phonologically conditioned suppletive allomorphy. This analysis simplifies phonology proper by shifting non-local harmony processes to morphology. Ascribing long-distance agreement patterns to allomorphy clarifies what a possible phonological process is and also provides further evidence for the possibility of strictly local phonological processes
Editors\u27 Note
No full textEditors\u27 Note for the Proceedings of the 2021 Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2021), held at York University in October 2021
Q-particles in embedded declaratives, mood, and clausal complementation
Get PDFQ-particles are functional items that are used to form alternative-related constructions. This paper investigates a hitherto understudied use of the Japanese Q-particle ka in which it occurs immediately below the declarative complementizer and imposes constraints on the doxastic state of the attitude holder. I show that this use of ka is licensed only under a limited range of attitude predicates, and once licensed, it encodes the presupposition that the attitude holder is \u27uncertain\u27 regarding the truth value of the proposition denoted by the embedded sentence
Debunking Multiform Dimensionality: many, Romance tant-PL, & morpho-syntactic opacity
Get PDFThe interpretation of much/many has been argued to be regulated by Uniform Dimensionality (Hackl 2000; Solt 2009): much is underspecified but many encodes cardinality. However, given some data where many denotes ‘volume’, Snyder (2021) proposes the need for Multiform Dimensionality: both much and many are underspecifed. After reviewing the English data, and in light of novel cross-linguistic data, we argue that neither generalization is fully accurate. Instead, following Wellwood (2015, 2018), we argue for an alternative, Abstract Uniform Dimensionality, which we propose to be universal: MUCH always measures cardinality when it scopes over semantically interpretable plural. We derive the universal by proposing that MUCH can occupy different positions in the NP, only one of which has semantic plural in its scope. Variation is thus not semantic, but morpho-syntactic
A novel argument for an even-like semantics of Mandarin dou
Get PDFThere have been ongoing debates about the semantics of Mandarin particle dou, which, among its various readings, has a distributive reading and a scalar reading. In the paper, we make a novel observation that dou, on both readings, is sensitive to a standard on a scale associated with a contextually supplied gradable property, and take this to be new evidence in favor of a unified, scalar analysis of dou. To uniformly capture its two readings and its standard-sensitivity, we propose to integrate insights from two proposals, Liu 2017 and Greenberg 2018a. Specifically, on the one hand, we follow Liu 2017 in arguing that (a) dou is uniformly a scalar particle, (b) it operates on distinct types of alternatives on distinct readings and (c) a trivialization operation occurs on the distributive reading; on the other hand, we, deviating from Liu, adopt two components adapted from the gradability-based semantics originally suggested for Englishevenin Greenberg 2018a, i.e. (a) anevaluative presupposition and (b) a contextually determined scale, instead of one based on unlikelihood. Our revised proposal can successfully account for the two readings in a unified manner but circumvents the issue regarding the dimension of the scale faced by Liu 2017 in the meanwhile
The realization of unaccentedness in Korean and Japanese pitch accent systems
Get PDFIn this paper, I discuss how unaccented words are realized in lexical pitch accent varieties of Korean and Japanese, focusing on Daegu/North Gyeongsang Korean. Previous studies such as Kenstowicz & Sohn (1997) and Jun et al. (2006) claim that Daegu Korean lacks an unaccented class. I show that the final-accented class in Daegu Korean proposed by Kenstowicz & Sohn (1997) and Jun et al. (2006) is in fact unaccented, comparing final-accented words in Daegu Korean with unaccented words in Tokyo Japanese in phrasal contexts. Most previous studies examined only the tone interaction between words and clitics to determine the accentedness or unaccentedness of the words, but this study demonstrates that phrasal prosody should also be considered to help identify the accentedness or unaccentedness of words
Learning phonetically and phonologically natural classes through constraint indexation
Get PDFPhonological processes tend to be defined over natural classes (Chomsky & Halle 1968), but there are some arbitrary and language-specific aspects to class behaviour (e.g., Mielke 2004). This paper shows that it is possible to implement a procedure of finding language specific natural classes using contrast detection (Dresher 2014, Sanstedt 2018), but in standard OT with domain-general methods. Three toy languages are constructed, based on those in Prickett & Jarosz (2021), in which /e/ raises to [i] in the presence of a high vowel and in which /s/ palatalizes to [ʃ] before [i]. In one language, raising feeds palatalization (transparent); in the second, raising counterfeeds palatalization (opaque); in the third, raising applies transparently, but only in certain morphemes (lexically specific). All three languages are learned with a version of Round’s (2017) learner that learns indexed constraints (Pater 2000) that are attached to specific segments in morphemes rather than entire morphemes (cf. Nazarov 2021). This learner is able to find appropriate natural classes for these data, both phonetic natural classes (=traditional natural classes) and what I call phonologically natural classes (classes defined by having certain phonetic properties and undergoing a range of phonological processes), showing the feasibility of this approach