Rhythmic Syncope and Opacity in Mojeño Trinitario
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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. -
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. -
Bleaching and Coloring*
386 Bleaching and Coloring* Patricia D. Miller Ohio State University Current studies in natural phonology have dealt with vowels in terms of three cardinal properties: palatality, labiality, and sonority. Palatality and labiality--the chromatic properties--are optimized by a minimally open, maximally constricted vocal tract; and sonority is optimized by a more open vowel tract) Thus the familiar triangle: A or, more exactly a a represents the maximal opposition of the three properties.2 And in many ways, the vowel space does seem to be triangular: ordinarily, the more sonorant a vowel is, the less color it has; and the more chromatic it is--the less sonorant. Thus, while i, e, and m are all palatal, i is more palatal than e, and e is more palatal than m; and, similarly, the degree of rounding varies for u, o, 3. The vowels #, A, and a are colorless or achromatic. They lack both palatality and labiality, and differ only in sonority.3 In this framework, the terms bleaching and coloring are almost self-explanatory: bleaching removes color, and coloring adds color. Bleaching Bleaching may remove palatality or labiality, or both simultaneously: V !lover -Labial !unstressed and/or !lax/short -Palatal] !mixed _(context) Full-scale operation of bleaching will produce linear vowel systems like those of the Caucasian languages reported to have k, A, a. If A lowers, it will produce the system 4, a like that of Kabardian (Kuipers 1960:23 et passim), or that of the child Curt4 (011er forthcoming); or, if all achromatics lower, it will give the single- vowel system, a. -
L Vocalisation As a Natural Phenomenon
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Essex Research Repository L Vocalisation as a Natural Phenomenon Wyn Johnson and David Britain Essex University [email protected] [email protected] 1. Introduction The sound /l/ is generally characterised in the literature as a coronal lateral approximant. This standard description holds that the sounds involves contact between the tip of the tongue and the alveolar ridge, but instead of the air being blocked at the sides of the tongue, it is also allowed to pass down the sides. In many (but not all) dialects of English /l/ has two allophones – clear /l/ ([l]), roughly as described, and dark, or velarised, /l/ ([…]) involving a secondary articulation – the retraction of the back of the tongue towards the velum. In dialects which exhibit this allophony, the clear /l/ occurs in syllable onsets and the dark /l/ in syllable rhymes (leaf [li˘f] vs. feel [fi˘…] and table [te˘b…]). The focus of this paper is the phenomenon of l-vocalisation, that is to say the vocalisation of dark /l/ in syllable rhymes 1. feel [fi˘w] table [te˘bu] but leaf [li˘f] 1 This process is widespread in the varieties of English spoken in the South-Eastern part of Britain (Bower 1973; Hardcastle & Barry 1989; Hudson and Holloway 1977; Meuter 2002, Przedlacka 2001; Spero 1996; Tollfree 1999, Trudgill 1986; Wells 1982) (indeed, it appears to be categorical in some varieties there) and which extends to many other dialects including American English (Ash 1982; Hubbell 1950; Pederson 2001); Australian English (Borowsky 2001, Borowsky and Horvath 1997, Horvath and Horvath 1997, 2001, 2002), New Zealand English (Bauer 1986, 1994; Horvath and Horvath 2001, 2002) and Falkland Island English (Sudbury 2001). -
The American Intrusive L
THE AMERICAN INTRUSIVE L BRYAN GICK University of British Columbia The well-known sandhi phenomenon known as intrusive r has been one of the longest-standing problems in English phonology. Recent work has brought to light a uniquely American contribution to this discussion: the intrusive l (as in draw[l]ing for drawing and bra[l] is for bra is in southern Pennsylvania, compared to draw[r]ing and bra[r] is, respectively, in British Received Pronunciation [RP]). In both instances of intrusion, a historically unattested liquid consonant (r or l) intervenes in the hiatus between a morpheme-final nonhigh vowel and a following vowel, either across or within words. Not surprisingly, this process interacts crucially with the well- known cases of /r/-vocalization (e.g., Kurath and McDavid 1961; Labov 1966; Labov, Yaeger, and Steiner 1972; Fowler 1986) and /l/-vocalization (e.g., Ash 1982a, 1982b), which have been identified as important markers of sociolinguistic stratification in New York City, Philadelphia, and else- where. However, previous discussion of the intrusive l (Gick 1999) has focused primarily on its phonological implications, with almost no attempt to describe its geographic, dialectal, and sociolinguistic context. This study marks such an attempt. In particular, it argues that the intrusive l is an instance of phonological change in progress. Descriptively, the intrusive l parallels the intrusive r in many respects. Intrusive r may be viewed simplistically as the extension by analogy of a historically attested final /r/ to words historically ending in a vowel (gener- ally this applies only to the set of non-glide-final vowels: /@, a, O/). -
On Syncope in Old English
In: Dieter Kastovsky and Aleksander Szwedek (eds) Linguistics across historical and geographical boundaries. In honour of Jacek Fisiak on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, 1986, 359-66. On syncope in Old English Raymond Hickey University of Bonn Abstract. Syncope in Old English is seen to be a rule which is determined by syllable structure but furthermore to be governed by a set of restricting conditions which refer to the world-class status of the forms which may act as input to the syncope rule, and also to the inflectional or derivational nature of the suffix which are added also to the precise phonological structure of those forms which undergo syncope. A phonological rule in a language which does not operate globally is always of particular interest as the conditions which restrict its application can frequently be recognized and formulized, at the same time throwing light on the nature of conditions which can in principle apply in a language’s phonology. In Old English a syncope rule existed which clearly related to the syllable structure of the forms it did not operate on but which was also subject to a set of restricting conditions which lie outside the domain of the syllable. The examination of this syncope rule and the conditions pertaining to it is the subject of this contribution. It is first of all necessary to distinguish syncope from another phonological process with which it might be confused. This is epenthesis, which appears to have been quite widespread in late West Saxon, as can be seen in the following forms. -
Rhythmic Syncope and Opacity in Mojeño Trinitario Françoise Rose
Rhythmic syncope and opacity in Mojeño Trinitario Françoise Rose To cite this version: Françoise Rose. Rhythmic syncope and opacity in Mojeño Trinitario. Phonological Data and Analysis, Linguistic Society of America, 2019, 1 (2), pp.1-25. 10.3765/pda.v1art2.2. hal-02275393 HAL Id: hal-02275393 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02275393 Submitted on 30 Aug 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution| 4.0 International License Phonological Data & Analysis Volume 1, Article 2: 1–25 (2019) pɗɑ https://doi.org/10.3765/pda.v1art2.2 Received 7 December 2017; revised 19 October 2018; accepted 29 January 2019. © 2019 Françoise Rose. Published by the Linguistic Society of America with permission of the author under a CC BY 3.0 license. Rhythmic syncope and opacity in Mojeño Trinitario Françoise Rose* Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – [email protected] This paper presents rhythmic syncope in Mojeño Trinitario, an Arawak language spoken in lowland Bolivia. In this language, every vowel that is in a weak prosodic position can syncopate. The syncope pattern of Mojeño Trinitario is remarkable for several reasons. -
Palatals in Spanish and French: an Analysis Rachael Gray
Florida State University Libraries Honors Theses The Division of Undergraduate Studies 2012 Palatals in Spanish and French: An Analysis Rachael Gray Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] Abstract (Palatal, Spanish, French) This thesis deals with palatals from Latin into Spanish and French. Specifically, it focuses on the diachronic history of each language with a focus on palatals. I also look at studies that have been conducted concerning palatals, and present a synchronic analysis of palatals in modern day Spanish and French. The final section of this paper focuses on my research design in second language acquisition of palatals for native French speakers learning Spanish. 2 THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES PALATALS IN SPANISH AND FRENCH: AN ANALYSIS BY: RACHAEL GRAY A Thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in the Major Degree Awarded: 3 Spring, 2012 The members of the Defense Committee approve the thesis of Rachael Gray defended on March 21, 2012 _____________________________________ Professor Carolina Gonzaléz Thesis Director _______________________________________ Professor Gretchen Sunderman Committee Member _______________________________________ Professor Eric Coleman Outside Committee Member 4 Contents Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... 5 0. -
Phonetic Explanation Without Compromise the Evolution of Mussau Syncope
Phonetic explanation without compromise The evolution of Mussau syncope Juliette Blevins Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig Blust (2005, 2007a, 2007b) questions the phonetic motivation of a number of well-attested sound changes. One sound change in this class is the purported case of stressed vowel syncope in Mussau, an Oceanic language (Blust 1984, 2001, 2007a). Regular syncopes typically target unstressed vowels. By contrast, loss of stressed vowels is difficult to motivate, due to their inherent prominence. Close inspection of Mussau historical phonology suggests that, at its origins, syncope was limited to unstressed vowels, with subsequent developments ob- scuring its original phonetic motivation. Under the proposed analysis, the Neo- grammarian insistence on phonetically motivated sound change is maintained. Keywords: sound change, phonetic motivation, naturalness, vowel syncope, Mussau 1. The general problem Are all sound changes phonetically motivated? The Neogrammarians believed so, and catalogued many instances where sound change was of a purely phonetic nature, triggered by the effects of surrounding sounds, accent, syllabic position, and general articulatory tendencies (Osthoff & Brugman 1878, Paul 1880). While Neogrammarian phonetic explanation was based primarily on the mechanisms of speech production, a range of students who studied in Leipzig during the latter part of the 19th century, from Baudouin de Courtenay to Gustaf E. Karsten, soon embraced perception as an additional explanatory mechanism of phonetically based sound change.1 In more recent times, further evidence has accumulated for 1. On Baudouin’s conception of misperception, see Blevins (2007a:144). Karsten, a student of Paul’s, presents an eloquent and strikingly modern exemplar-based view of sound change and analogy in which perception and misperception are central in his 1894 paper “The Psychological Basis of Phonetic Law and Analogy”. -
Opaque Distributional Generalisations in Tundra Nenets ∗
Opaque distributional generalisations in Tundra Nenets ∗ Peter Staroverov August 1, 2020 Abstract Based on primary data from Tundra Nenets, this paper explores phonological patterns which seem to require restrictions on the input, and thus present a particular challenge to Optimality Theory. In these patterns, a contrastive segment appears only in the environments where it is also derived by active alternations in the language. I illustrate this with with the behaviour of Tundra Nenets /k/, and argue that these patterns can be analysed as distributional generalisa- tions that hold only at early derivational levels. A Stratal OT analysis is proposed. Tundra Nenets also presents a pattern which appears to involve unnatural classes, but is reanalysed with only natural class alternations on my account. 1 Introduction Classical Optimality Theory (OT) allows no restrictions on the input – a principle labelled RICHNESS OF THE BASE (RoTB) by Prince & Smolensky (2004) and criticized by Vaysman (2002); Hansson (2003); Rasin & Katzir (2017). Despite the criticism, no real alternatives to Richness of the Base have been proposed within OT, the existing computational implementa- tions of OT evaluation and typology rely on it (Staubs et al., 2010; Hayes et al., 2013; Prince et al., 2018), and the synchronic analyses of sound patterns presuppose it. In this paper, I explore a particular kind of phonological pattern where a contrastive seg- ment emerges only in the environments where it is also derived by an alternation, using the example of /k/ in Tundra Nenets. As argued by McCarthy (2005), such patterns call for in- corporating input restrictions in the phonological theory, against RoTB . -
HIATUS RESOLUTION in AMERICAN ENGLISH: the CASE AGAINST GLIDE INSERTION Lisa Davidson Daniel Erker
+LDWXVUHVROXWLRQLQ$PHULFDQ(QJOLVK7KHFDVHDJDLQVW JOLGHLQVHUWLRQ Lisa Davidson, Daniel Erker Language, Volume 90, Number 2, June 2014, pp. 482-514 (Article) Published by Linguistic Society of America DOI: 10.1353/lan.2014.0028 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lan/summary/v090/90.2.davidson.html Access provided by Boston University Libraries (24 Jun 2014 11:39 GMT) HIATUS RESOLUTION IN AMERICAN ENGLISH: THE CASE AGAINST GLIDE INSERTION Lisa Davidson Daniel Erker New York University Boston University It has generally been assumed that after nonlow vowels in English, hiatus is resolved by insert- ing a homorganic glide (e.g. seeing [sijɪŋ], Itô & Mester 2009). However, despite suspicions that inserted glides may be fundamentally different from lexical glides (e.g. Cruttenden 2008), a sys- tematic phonetic investigation of the purported glide is lacking. We examine the nature of hiatus resolution by comparing three environments: (i) vowel-vowel sequences within words (VV: kiosk), (ii) vowel-vowel sequences across word boundaries (VBV: see otters), and (iii) vowel- glide-vowel sequences across word boundaries (VGV: see yachts). The first finding is that a glot- tal stop produced between the vowels accounts for nearly half of the responses for VBV phrases, whereas glottal stops are present in less than 5% of the VV and the VGV conditions. Second, an acoustic comparison of VV, VBV, and VGV phrases not produced with glottal stops shows signif- icant differences between the vowel-glide-vowel and the vowel-vowel sequences on all measures, including duration, intensity, and formants. These results indicate that American English speakers tend to resolve hiatus at word boundaries with glottal stop insertion, whereas there is no hiatus res- olution at all within words. -
Slouching Toward Optimality: Coda Reduction in OT-CC John J
University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series Linguistics January 2007 Slouching toward optimality: Coda reduction in OT-CC 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., "Slouching toward optimality: Coda reduction in OT-CC" (2007). Phonological Studies (Journal of the Phonological Society of Japan). 74. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/linguist_faculty_pubs/74 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]. Slouching Towards Optimality: Coda Reduction in OT-CC* John J. McCarthy University of Massachusetts Amherst Abstract. There is a well-established asymmetry in the behavior of medial consonant clusters: the first consonant in the cluster can undergo assimilation or deletion, but the second consonant in the cluster cannot. This article presents an explanation for that asymmetry based on a version of Optimality Theory with candidate chains (McCarthy (2006a)). The key idea is that a consonant can only assimilate or delete if it first loses its place features by debuccalizing, and debuccalization is only possible in coda position. Keywords: OT, coda, assimilation, candidate chain. 1. Introduction Medial consonant clusters are often simplified or assimilated: /patka/ → [paka], /pamka/ → [paŋka]. There is an interesting asymmetry in these processes: they always target the first member of the cluster for deletion or assimilation.