The central hypothesis of this article is that Welsh direct object mutation—the only instance of mutation in the Celtic languages not triggered by a specific lexical item—is the PF-realisation of AgrO’s accusative Case as the floating lenition-triggering phonological feature L (cf. Lieber 1983 and Zwicky 1984). The analysis proposed in this article is an empirically adquate analysis of initial consonant mutation in Welsh, which fully integrates direct object mutation with other cases of mutation, relates mutation to phonosyntactic processes found in other languages, notably Southern Italian /u/-propagation (Rizzi and Savoia 1991) and French liaison (Manzini 1983), and fits naturally into a non-checking-theoreticconception of Parametric Variation of the sort outlined in Roberts and Roussou (1997a).

Few topics in the phonological literature have inspired the amount of attention that has been lavished on the notorious “mute-e” of contemporary French. Perhaps the most perplexing difficulty for phonologists is how (or even whether) to include schwa in phonological representations. Solution of the representation problem, moreover, is necessary for a proper identification of the conditions under which schwa is deleted, maintained or inserted, and for an analysis of alternations linking schwa and other vowels. Many different solutions to the representation problem have been suggested: schwa as a distinct vowel; schwa as absent from the phonemic inventory (hence from underlying representations) and inserted as a “lubrifiant”; or (in the current non-linear literature), schwa as an empty nucleus; schwa as an unlinked vowel.

This article proposes that Late Archaic Chinese object relative clauses were reduced relative clauses consisting of a TP dominated by DP. They contained a functional morpheme suo, which attracted an operator to the edge of the vP before moving to T in order to provide T with an [N] feature that could be selected by D. The embedded subject moved to the specifier of the nominalized T, where it valued genitive case with D under Agree. The reduced nature of SUO relative clauses accounts for the fact that a unique strategy was required for relativization on VP-internal positions, as opposed to subject position, since the lack of a CP layer denied the clause a uniform landing site for operators originating internal and external to vP. This analysis also accounts for the loss of the relativization asymmetry by correlating it with the loss of nominalizing morphology such as genitive case.

The process of vowel nasalization in Portuguese has been a fascinating topic for investigation since the earliest days of Romance philology, and much energy has been expended to determine the origin, development, and contemporary manifestations of the Portuguese nasal vowels. Despite the large amount of scholarly activity devoted to the nasal vowels, however, surprisingly little attention had traditionally been paid to the manner in which they are recognized and produced by native speakers, other than a few traditional phonemic analyses. More recently, aspects of the Portuguese nasal vowel system have been investigated within the framework of generative phonology, with a view toward motivating a series of highly abstract structures underlying the forms of modern Portuguese; as a consequence, more attention was paid to the various details of the vowel nasalization process. The present paper is offered as an addition to the synchronic studies of Portuguese vowel nasalization, since the nasalization process presents several unique peculiarities which warrant a more detailed investigation. The object of this report is to bring up for discussion several aspects of vowel nasalization in Portuguese which have either been neglected in the literature, or which have received incomplete or conflicting descriptions. Other than an introduction to the general problem OI the Portuguese nasal vowels, no attempt will be made at reanalyzing areas which have been adequately covered in other studies, even when the opinions of the present writer differ radically from those of other investigators.

Previous evidence has suggested that acoustic similarity between first language (L1) and second language (L2) sounds is an accurate indicator of the speakers’ L2 classification patterns. This study investigates this assumption by examining how speakers of an under-researched language, namely Cypriot Greek, classify L2 English vowels in terms of their L1 categories. The experimental protocol relied on a perception and a production study. For the purpose of the production study, two linear discriminant analysis (LDA) models, one with both formants and duration (FD) and one with only formants (F) as input, were used to predict this classification; the models included data from both English and Cypriot Greek speakers. The perception study consisted of a classification task performed by adult Cypriot Greek advanced speakers of English who permanently resided in Cyprus. The results demonstrated that acoustic similarity was a relatively good predictor of speakers’ classification patterns as the majority of L2 vowels classified with the highest proportion were predicted with success by the LDA models. In addition, the F model was better than the FD model in predicting the full range of responses. This shows that duration features were less important than formant features for the prediction of L2 vowel classification.

While the use of well as an intensifier of most adjectives had supposedly died out by Early Modern English (Fettig 1934: 186, Mustanoja 1960: 327, Stenström 2000: 188, Ito and Taglimonte 2003: 278), no studies have empirically examined its frequency diachronically. The present study traces its use from Early Modern English (1560) to Present Day English, (2014) using five speech-related corpora in addition to various dialectal sources and audio/video clips. Results indicate that this use was retained in some dialects of English despite not being attested in the Corpus of English Dialogues nor the Old Bailey Corpus, which document predominantly the incipient standard variety. A qualitative analysis of its use reveals a potential diachronic shift in its stress pattern and the scale structure of its intensified heads. Moreover, the present study discusses some of the methodological challenges which arise when using historical corpora to investigate linguistic change, drawing particular attention to sample representativeness and data analysis.

This article questions the view that phonetics governs exclusively gradient phenomena. Experimental data from an ultrasound study of English flap allophones show unconditioned categorical variation in the production of everyday words. Individual variation is discussed as an essential area of empirical investigation in uncovering emergent categorical properties of language.

Linguistic analyses of aphasic patients’ performances have developed to the point where interesting, non-trivial descriptions and explanations of pathological performances are available in linguistic and processing terms. The purpose of this paper is to present a short synopsis for linguists of several recent analyses of aphasic patients’ disturbances in the sphere of comprehension of syntactic form. This presentation is designed to illustrate some of the logical and methodological issues regarding the analysis of aphasic data, as well as to present specific results of our investigations. On the basis of our case studies, we also suggest several aspects of syntactic structure and parsing.

The present article demonstrates how the so far unchallenged misanalysis within Chinese linguistics of a few, but central, data points has led to a distorted picture biasing, inter alia, the general typology of wh-in-situ languages as well as the crosslinguistic study of Quantifier Phrases. This is the case for méi yǒu rén ‘not exist person’, hěnshǎo yǒu rén ‘rarely exist person’, and zhǐ yǒu DP ‘only exist DP’, which are not nominal projections equivalent of ‘nobody’, ‘only DP’, and ‘few people’ as currently assumed, but existential constructions: ‘there isn't anybody’, ‘there is only DP’, and ‘there are rarely people’. In addition, a subset of speakers has reanalyzed hěnshǎo (yǒu) rén with a covert yǒu ‘exist’ as a QP hěnshǎo rén ‘few people’. A corpus study highlights the limited distribution of hěnshǎo rén ‘few people’, which shows that it is not on a par with its antonym hěn duō rén ‘many people’.

This article investigates the varied uses of wh-words in Chuj, an understudied Mayan language of Guatemala. Cross-linguistically, wh-words are commonly used not only for question formation but also in a range of other constructions, including wh-quantification, indefinites, and the formation of relative clauses. In Chuj, we will show that wh-words are used to form indefinites (in certain limited environments), universal quantifiers, free choice items, and two kinds of free relatives: definite free relatives, but also the typologically rarer indefinite free relatives. We sketch an analysis of each construction, and discuss generalizations concerning their distribution. The varied uses of wh-words in Chuj support the view that wh-words are used in two capacities: to generate alternatives, and to create a movement/binding relation.

It is commonly noted that standard French is losing the contrast between its two low vowels /a/ and /ɑ/, due to the fronting of the back vowel. The difference in length, which accompanied the qualitative difference of this pair, is affected as well. In mainland France, this tendency can be found to various degrees across the country, and is spreading throughout the speech community. This article further develops the picture of the current status of the low vowel contrast by investigating Belgian and Swiss French, where length is known to play overall a far more prominent role in the vowel inventories than it does in standard French. Are Belgian and Swiss French also affected by the merger of the two low vowels? To what extent can a difference in length and/or timbre still be found? And how do the patterns of contrast neutralisation/preservation relate to the developments in France?

This article presents a novel analysis of Negative Auxiliary Inversion (NAI) constructions such as didn't many people eat, in which a negated auxiliary appears in pre-subject position. NAI, found in varieties including Appalachian, African American, and West Texas English, has a word order identical to a yes/no question, but is pronounced and interpreted as a declarative. We propose that NAI subjects are negative DPs, and that the negation raises from the subject DP to adjoin to Fin (a functional head in the left periphery). Three properties of NAI motivate this analysis: (i) scope freezing effects, (ii) the various possible and impossible NAI subject types, and (iii) the incompatibility of NAI constructions with true Double-Negation interpretations. Implications for theories of Negative Concord, Negative Polarity Items, and the representation of negation are discussed.

Most research on Algonquian languages, of which Cree is a typical example, is based on collections of narrative texts (Wolfart 1973; Dahlstrom 1986; James 1986). Although there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this approach, the use of one particular type of database in such an extensive amount of research lends itself to a genre-biased description of the language. In oral cultures, many narrative texts are typically preplanned (Chafe 1985) and therefore will have, according to researchers in discourse analysis, many of the features of preplanned texts such as complete and longer sentences, higher clause density and a larger proportion of subordinate clauses (Brown and Yule 1985:151–117; Biber 1988:47). In addition, other language-specific features may occur.

Over the past few years, research in language acquisition has shifted away from the view that linguistic structures are learned independently of semantic concepts and grammatical functions and toward a more cognitively based perspective (cf. Slobin 1973 ; Clark and Clark 1977). In the latter approach, cognitive principles are assumed to govern the acquisition of linguistic structures, and the earlier autonomous view of language acquisition is replaced by a more catholic attitude encompassing both formal and psychological aspects of language. This perspective is adopted for the analyses presented below.

Métif is a language spoken in the Canadian prairie provinces and the American prairie states bordering Canada. There are probably between 3000 and 5000 people who speak Métif as their first language, most of them of advanced age. They are living mostly in scattered Métis settlements. The Métis are a nation of mixed Amerindian and European descent. From the 17th century on French Canadian fur traders and voyageurs travelled west-wards from French Canada. Many of them married Amerindian women, who were often Cree speaking. Around 1860 the Métis were the largest population group of the Canadian West, many of them multilinguals. From the first decades of the 19th century the Métis started to consider themselves as a separate ethnic group, neither European nor Amerindian (see e.g., Peterson and Brown 1985). The Métis are still a distinct people. The Métis nowadays often speak Cree, Ojibwa, Métif, French and English or a combination of these. They often speak particular varieties of these languages. Not only is the French spoken by the Métis markedly different from other North American French dialects the language called Métif is uniquely spoken among the Métis people. For more information on Métif and Métis languages, see the publications listed in Bakker (1989).

This paper summarizes the findings of an extensive study of Haitian Creole morphology as compared with that of contributing languages: French, the lexifier language, and Fon, the West African language selected as the substratum language. The proposal we want to argue for in this paper is that, although the phonetic matrices of Haitian Creole lexical items are recognizable as being from French, at a more abstract level the productive affixes of Haitian Creole pattern in a significant way with the model of contributing West African languages, in this case Fon. This being the case, the widespread assumption in the creole literature that creole languages have undergone morphological simplification is not borne out by the Haitian data (cf. several discussions on this topic in Hymes 1971).

The New Zealand accent belongs to the British group of English accents. There are three main divisions: General New Zealand, which is spoken in most parts of the country, and the accents of Otago, in the south of the South Island, and on the West Coast of the South Island. The three divisions follow the original pattern of settlement. In the North Island, settlement was directed by the New Zealand Company, which founded Auckland and Wellington in 1840; other settlements followed in the late 1840s. In the South, the Anglican Church founded Christchurch and Nelson in the early 1850s. These settlements had the common aim of reproducing English society as it existed in the south of England and drew most of their settlers from persons dispossessed by the Industrial Revolution. The difficulties of life in early New Zealand effectively levelled out social differences, with important effects on the language. Otago was founded in 1848 by the Scottish Free Church. The West Coast was not settled until the Gold Rush of the 1860s attracted miners from the goldfields of Victoria and California. Since that time there has been considerable immigration from the British Isles, at first a mere trickle from Europe and then a flood of Central European refugees after the Second World War. In general the willingness of the average New Zealander to travel for reasons of work or promotion has prevented the growth of regional accents; but the West Coast and Otago tend to keep to themselves, isolated by rough country and their own sense of community.

This article argues for the existence of expressive palatalization (E-Pal) – a phonologically unmotivated process that applies in sound symbolism, diminutive constructions, and babytalk registers. It is proposed that E-Pal is grounded in iconic sound-meaning associations exploiting acoustic properties of palatalized consonants and thus is inherently different from regular phonological palatalization (P-Pal). A cross-linguistic survey of patterns of E-Pal in 37 languages shows that it exhibits a set of properties different from P-Pal. The case study focuses on patterns of palatalization in Japanese mimetic vocabulary and babytalk. Two experiments testing native speaker intuitions of these patterns revealed that both patterns exhibit place and manner asymmetries typical of cross-linguistic patterns of E-Pal. The cross-linguistic survey, the two experiments, and analysis of the origins and structural differences of E-Pal and P-Pal provide strong empirical and theoretical motivation to distinguish the two.

This article explores long head movement configurations in Breton. Its purpose is twofold. First it contributes to existing work by demonstrating that Breton long head movement is motivated by information structure. The operation of general economy principles, made sensitive to information structure, determines many of the properties of the Breton construction. Secondly, it is argued that the derivation of the Breton construction does not involve movement per se; minimality conditions on movement are not central to the derivation. Instead, the remaining properties of the construction are attributed to a semantic property of tense-aspect markers which is represented at the LF interface. This work bears on the issue of how to model the interpretive dependency between auxiliaries and main verbs and raises questions concerning the interaction between the stylistic component, information structure, and the LF interface.