5 Structure-Preserving Sound Change: a Look at Unstressed Vowel Syncope in Austronesian
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The Serial Interaction of Stress and Syncope John J
University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series Linguistics January 2008 The serial interaction of stress and syncope John J. McCarthy University of Massachusetts, Amherst, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/linguist_faculty_pubs Part of the Morphology Commons, Near Eastern Languages and Societies Commons, and the Phonetics and Phonology Commons Recommended Citation McCarthy, John J., "The es rial interaction of stress and syncope" (2008). Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. 90. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/linguist_faculty_pubs/90 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Linguistics at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Nat Lang Linguist Theory (2008) 26: 499–546 DOI 10.1007/s11049-008-9051-3 ORIGINAL PAPER The serial interaction of stress and syncope John J. McCarthy Received: 7 November 2007 / Accepted: 12 April 2008 / Published online: 26 August 2008 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008 Abstract Many languages respect the generalization that some or all unstressed vow- els are deleted. This generalization proves elusive in classic Optimality Theory, how- ever. The source of the problem is classic OT’s parallel evaluation, which requires that the effects of stress assignment and syncope be optimized together. This article argues for a version of OT called Harmonic Serialism, in which the effects of stress assignment and syncope can and must be evaluated sequentially. The results are po- tentially applicable to other domains where process interaction is best understood in derivational terms. -
Chapter One Phonetic Change
CHAPTERONE PHONETICCHANGE The investigation of the nature and the types of changes that affect the sounds of a language is the most highly developed area of the study of language change. The term sound change is used to refer, in the broadest sense, to alterations in the phonetic shape of segments and suprasegmental features that result from the operation of phonological process es. The pho- netic makeup of given morphemes or words or sets of morphemes or words also may undergo change as a by-product of alterations in the grammatical patterns of a language. Sound change is used generally to refer only to those phonetic changes that affect all occurrences of a given sound or class of sounds (like the class of voiceless stops) under specifiable phonetic conditions . It is important to distinguish between the use of the term sound change as it refers tophonetic process es in a historical context , on the one hand, and as it refers to phonetic corre- spondences on the other. By phonetic process es we refer to the replacement of a sound or a sequenceof sounds presenting some articulatory difficulty by another sound or sequence lacking that difficulty . A phonetic correspondence can be said to exist between a sound at one point in the history of a language and the sound that is its direct descendent at any subsequent point in the history of that language. A phonetic correspondence often reflects the results of several phonetic process es that have affected a segment serially . Although phonetic process es are synchronic phenomena, they often have diachronic consequences. -
Syncope in Crimean Tatar*
Syncope in Crimean Tatar* Darya Kavitskaya Yale University Crimean Tatar has a pervasive syncope of high vowels postlexically. The syncope of unstressed vowels only occurs when it results in a phonotactically acceptable syllable structure. Additionally, stressed high vowels delete between identical consonants with the following degemination which is attributed to a highly ranked OCP constraint. An apparent counterexample, the syncope of high vowels followed by voiceless geminates, is shown to be a matter of phonetic implementation, while the former processes have to be represented in phonology. 1. Introduction Crimean Tatar (henceforth, CT) is a West Kipchak language which belongs to the northwestern branch of Turkic (Johanson 1998:81). CT is spoken mainly in the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine, as well as in Uzbekistan, and also in small communities in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey. According to traditional descriptions, CT is subdivided into three dialects: Southern (or Coastal), Central, and Northern (or Steppe) (Johanson and Csato 1998). All three dialects are endangered (Southern and Northern more so than Central): the language is now extensively used mostly by the speakers older than forty, and very few children learn it as their first language. The sociolinguistic situation of CT is quite unusual. In 1944, the entire Tatar population of Crimea was deported to Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan), and to several locations in Russia. As a result, the speakers of CT dialects that used to be linguistically homogenous were separated, mixed, and immersed into radically different language environments. The early 1990s saw the return of Crimean Tatars to their homeland. Currently about 250,000 Crimean Tatars live in Crimea again, and another 250,000 are still in exile. -
Muna Dialects and Monic Lan:;(Jages: 'Icmards a Rex:Ons'iruction
MUNA DIALECTS AND MONIC LAN:;(JAGES: 'ICMARDS A REX:ONS'IRUCTION Rene van den Eerg University of Ieiden/ Surrrrer Institute of Linguistics p:iper to oo presented at the Fifth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics Auckland, NE.w Zealand, January 10-16, 1988 ·...- MUNA DIALECI'S AND MUNIC ~ES: 'KMARDS A ROCONSTRu::::TION1 Rene van den Berg University of Leiden/ Sumrer Institute of Linguistics 0. Introduction 1. Muna: language l:x>undaries and dialects 2. Standard Muna phonology 3. Muna dialects: phonological differences 4. Muna dialects: the free pronouns 5. Muna dialects: lexical-sarantic differences 6. Pancanic isolects References Appendix 1: Cognate percentages Appendix 2: Proto-Muna etym:i. Appendix 3: Map 2 Muna-Buton area 0. Introduction Our knCMledge of the linguistic situation on the islands off the souteast coast of Sulawesi is still rud..i.rrentary . ..Adriani (1914) rrentions two languages for the islands Muna and Buton. Esser ( 1938) coined the teirn 'Muna.-Buton group' and included four languages in it. Fifty years later we still do not knCM exactly how :rrany languages there are. in this area: Anceaux ( 1978) and Bhurhanuddin ( 1979) both list seven, excluding the Bungku languages and 'Iblaki, in which they follCM Esser. In Sneddon (1982) these seven are reduced to five, whereas Kaseng et al. ( 19 83) reach a total of eight. 'Ihe only language in this group al:xmt which adequate lexical and grarrnatical info:r::rration is available is 'Wolio (Anceaux 1952, 1987) . 'Ihe question of internal subgrouping within the putative Muna-Buton group is hardly asked, nor do we know on what basis these languages are grouped tog-ether, and whether other languages should be included in this group. -
The Phonology, Phonetics, and Diachrony of Sturtevant's
Indo-European Linguistics 7 (2019) 241–307 brill.com/ieul The phonology, phonetics, and diachrony of Sturtevant’s Law Anthony D. Yates University of California, Los Angeles [email protected] Abstract This paper presents a systematic reassessment of Sturtevant’s Law (Sturtevant 1932), which governs the differing outcomes of Proto-Indo-European voiced and voice- less obstruents in Hittite (Anatolian). I argue that Sturtevant’s Law was a con- ditioned pre-Hittite sound change whereby (i) contrastively voiceless word-medial obstruents regularly underwent gemination (cf. Melchert 1994), but gemination was blocked for stops in pre-stop position; and (ii) the inherited [±voice] contrast was then lost, replaced by the [±long] opposition observed in Hittite (cf. Blevins 2004). I pro- vide empirical and typological support for this novel restriction, which is shown not only to account straightforwardly for data that is problematic under previous analy- ses, but also to be phonetically motivated, a natural consequence of the poorly cued durational contrast between voiceless and voiced stops in pre-stop environments. I develop an optimality-theoretic analysis of this gemination pattern in pre-Hittite, and discuss how this grammar gave rise to synchronic Hittite via “transphonologization” (Hyman 1976, 2013). Finally, it is argued that this analysis supports deriving the Hittite stop system from the Proto-Indo-European system as traditionally reconstructed with an opposition between voiceless, voiced, and breathy voiced stops (contra Kloekhorst 2016, Jäntti 2017). Keywords Hittite – Indo-European – diachronic phonology – language change – phonological typology © anthony d. yates, 2019 | doi:10.1163/22125892-00701006 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NCDownloaded4.0 License. -