Linguistics

Several factors can influence early prominence in double-stressed words (e.g., Maltese), namely the presence of foot-level stress clash with a following word, and their adjacency to domain-initial boundaries. We test whether initial accent can occur in such words even when the words are spoken in isolation. Fourteen targets and 26 tri-syllabic filler-items were produced in isolation and in a frame sentence, e.g., [SayMalteseagain], by 12 English speakers. In isolation, ‘Early’ prominence on, e.g., Mal- is more likely because the target is utterance- and phrase-initial. In the Embedded condition, phrasal prominence should be less likely on the initial syllable because there is a weaker bo..

The Ninth Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2022) was hosted by the UCLA Department of Linguistics on October 21-23, 2022. This editor's note to the Proceedings of AMP 2022 discusses abstract submission and acceptance, the review process, and the editors' acknowledgements.

This work is about two ‘generation problems’ for classic Optimality Theory, chain shifts and saltations. The issues for OT posed by traditional analyses of chain shifts and saltations have led to various embellishments of the classic theory, typically in the form of novel constraint types. Reiss (2021a,b) proposes a general solution to the problem of chain shifts and saltations that relies more directly on different assumptions about representations than about constraints. Specifically, Reiss assumes that underlying representations may be underspecified, and that a map ‘counts’ as a chain shift or as a saltation so long as the surface alternants from a uniform underlying representati..

The cross-linguistic under-representation of adjacent consonants sharing a place of articulation within uninflected lexical items is well documented. At the same time, little is known regarding the specific diachronic mechanisms involved in the emergence and maintenance of this pattern. Phylogenetic analyses provide some support for the idea that adjacent identical consonants within words arise infrequently, but stronger support for the idea that words containing such a pattern die out more frequently than those without. I highlight the value of tools used in this paper for exploring the evolution of sound patterns, and also discuss some limitations of the implementation used in the paper to..

As is known, the fundamental frequencies (F0) of the vowels following aspirated or lenis stops have become associated with the aspirated~lenis stop contrast while Voice Onset Time (VOT) values of them became merged in Seoul Korean. Previous studies found the effects of age, gender, lexical frequency, and vowel height. However, although lexical competition has been demonstrated to affect the trajectory of sound change regarding contrastivity, it has not been considered in this context. The present study examines the effects of lexical competition on this sound change. Through a production experiment, analyses demonstrate that the aspirated~lenis contrast is hyperarticulated in minimal pairs f..

In standard Optimality Theoretic analyses of weight-sensitive stress, no consideration is given to thepossibility that languages may reposition the edges of the prosodic word in order to avoid violations ofconstraints related to syllable weight. I propose that this underexplored prediction is borne out in Karuk (isolate, California) and Majhi Punjabi (Indo-Aryan).

This paper discusses a case of putative dominance reversal in the Komo language (Otero 2015, 2019), which we analyze as a related, but distinct repair strategy called “Use it or Lose it” (Mullin & Pater 2015).Mullin & Pater (2015) argue that Use it or Lose it harmony is a pathological prediction of Agree for the same basic reason that “Sour Grapes” harmony (Wilson 2003, 2006; Heinz & Lai 2013) has been regarded as pathological – both Use it or Lose it and Sour Grapes harmony patterns are non-myopic (Wilson 2003, 2006). Wilson argues that unbounded spreading patterns are universally myopic, and as such, no theory should predict that the realization of some element in spr..

In this paper, I present results from simulations using three different maximum entropy phonotactic models (Hayes & Wilson, 2008; Moreton et al., 2017): one that can only represent Sour Grapes, one that can only represent standard, attested harmony, and one that has the expressive power to capture both patterns. I then present results from an experiment designed to test the predictions of these models and find that humans behave most like the model that can capture both generalizations—challenging the idea that Sour Grapes is categorically unlearnable.

This paper refutes the claim made by Dabkowski (2021) that stress patterns in the A’ingae languagethat he documents and analyses are only explainable by co-phonologies and not by what he refers toas ‘representational’ frameworks such as Gradient Symbolic Computation (Smolensky & Goldrick, 2016)(henceforth GSC). This issue is important because it bears upon the question of what kinds of frameworkscan or cannot account for observed patterns in phonology.

The aim of this paper is to address an often-overlooked topic in Southern Min tonology: neutral tone. We show that the tone sandhi domain in Southern Min is not always isomorphic with an XP in syntax or a phonological phrase. In fact, this domain may be smaller than what has been predicted, as evidenced in the phrase-final functional morphemes as well as in the rhythmic effect. We propose that the tone sandhi domain in Southern Min is defined by a constituent Tone Sandhi Domain (TSD, τ) between the p-phrase and the p-word. A TSD is required to bear a final prominence, and only a p-word, mapped from a contentive or focused element in syntax, can be a “prominence-bearing unit.”

Recent work has shown that lexical items come to take on the phonetic characteristics of the prosodic environments in which they are typically produced, a phenomenon referred to as "leaky prosody". Focusing on pitch patterns in Mandarin, we show that leaky prosody can be derived froma flat (i.e., non-transformational, non-optimizing) model of speech production. Formalized using Dynamic Field Theory, in our model, lexical, phonological, and prosodic inputs each exert forces on a Dynamic Neural Field representing pitch. Notably, the forces exerted by these inputs reflect surface distributions in a large corpus of spontaneous speech. Our simulations showed that the flat model derives the short ..

There are competing views in contemporary phonological theory about how to best represent processes that are pervasive, frequent, and phonologically motivated, yet still lexically sensitive. To what extent can – or should – a process that applies idiosyncratically to different morphemes, words, and even phrases, be represented in a way that allows it to generalize to novel forms? We examine this question by looking at prenominal liaison as it is used in contemporary Laurentian French, spoken in Canada. We present the results of an online production study that compares application of liaison in real vs. nonce nouns, and that considers the effect of nonce nouns’ phonological properties a..

Substantive bias affects phonological acquisition in a way that learners may more readily learn phonetically motivated patterns. Some previous experimental work has proved the effect of substantive bias in a synchronic context, whereas how the bias influences diachronic changes has hardly been studied. This paper investigates the role of substantive bias in phonological transmission. We employed the iterated learning paradigm to compare the transmissions of two artificial languages exhibiting vowel harmony (phonetically natural) or vowel disharmony (phonetically unnatural). In general, participants performed equally well in the two conditions, and the proportions of the two patterns showed a..

This study aims to tease apart two proposals regarding the phonetic realization of toneless TBUs: that they are realized with default (often L) tones (Yip 2002; Zhang 2016), or that they stay without phonological tones and surface as interpolated pitch between tonal targets (Pierrehumbert & Beckman 1988; Zhang et al. 2019). The original fieldwork data of toneless moras in Suzhou Chinese (Northern Wu) demonstrated considerable variation in toneless realization, both across- and within-speaker. Assessed by the simulation & classification framework of Shaw and Kawahara (2018), some speakers more frequently used interpolation between tones (e.g., high level between Hs, low rising between..

This paper analyzes the phonology of the definite determiner (DET) of two Yemeni Tihami Arabic dialects. The underlying Det for one dialect (the b-dialect) is /b-/: [θoor] ‘ox’- [b-θoor] ‘the ox’, and /m/ for another dialect (the OCP m-dialect): [m-θoor] ‘the ox’. Although the determiner is underlyingly different in both dialects, it fully assimilates to the following word-initial consonant if it is labial, creating a word-initial geminate. On the surface, the onset geminate behaves differently in both dialects. I present an analysis that treats them the same except for their underlying representation and the ranking of two constraints. Both dialects present further complicati..

Several factors can influence early prominence in double-stressed words (e.g., Maltese), namely the presence of foot-level stress clash with a following word, and their adjacency to domain-initial boundaries. We test whether initial accent can occur in such words even when the words are spoken in isolation. Fourteen targets and 26 tri-syllabic filler-items were produced in isolation and in a frame sentence, e.g., [SayMalteseagain], by 12 English speakers. In isolation, ‘Early’ prominence on, e.g., Mal- is more likely because the target is utterance- and phrase-initial. In the Embedded condition, phrasal prominence should be less likely on the initial syllable because there is a weaker bo..

Affrication (also known as Assibilation) is recognized as one of the strongest and most reliable accent markers of Laurentian French, yet its behavior in external sandhi has received little attention. It is described in the literature as variable, optional, and even prohibited. In this article, we demonstrate that affrication between two words is mandatory, prohibited, or optional depending on the syntactic relationship between the words involved. Data comes from a pilot study of 35 native speakers of Laurentian French. We offer an analysis of these effects that considers both the syntactic (phases) and phonological (CVCV Phonology) modules of each derivation.

In this paper, I describe and analyze reduplication in A’ingae (ISO 639-3:con), an understudied andendangered Amazonian isolate. The reduplicant is a suffix-ʔσ, whereʔis a fixed segment andσisa syllable copied from the right edge of the word. Only disyllabic roots can be reduplicated, andthe disyllabic root is parsed as a trochaic foot in the surface form. If the second syllable of the rootis a diphthong, it undergoes monophthongization in the base.I model these properties with a reduplicant-specificcophonology(e.g. Orgun, 1996), whichconsists of a ranking of constraints motivated elsewhere in the language’s grammar. Thus, I demonstrate that A’ingae reduplication is phonologically ..

Northern dialects of the Mayan language Mam have a ternary weight scale for assigning stress, with the added wrinkle that syllables with glottal codas are heavier than those with other coda types: VV > Vʔ > VC > V. This ranking is initially surprising under the currently accepted prominence theory of weight (Ryan 2019, 2020), where all codas are equally moraic in all contexts. However, a phonetic experiment undertaken by Kuo & Elkins (2022) on the Northern Todos Santos Mam variety shows that Vʔ (i.e. syllables with glottal codas) are realized as lengthened glottalized vowels without a [ʔ] release, with vowel length intermediate between that of V and VV. Consequently, the Mam ..

The acquisition of a phonological grammar requires the segmentation of an utterance into individual consonants and vowels as a first step, yet it is often taken as a given. I show that segmentation is not a trivial problem by drawing evidence from Mandarin Chinese, where the shortage of morphophonological processes leads to ambiguity in the segmentation of prenuclear glides. I present two language game experiments, in which Mandarin speakers are asked to disassemble syllables in their language, thus revealing their segmental structure. The task, based on fanqie secret languages, involves taking a disyllabic word and swapping its two onsets, in order to form a codeword. What the speaker does ..

Ancient Greek accent involves both stress and tone (Allen 1973, Steriade 1988). We present here a new piece of evidence for the details of the tonal part, based on a lowering process whereby a H tone on the final TBU of a word lowers if the word is followed by another tonic word: H...H → L...H. This is essentially what is reported for Rimi, a Tanzanian Bantu language, where HH loses the first of its H tones (Olson 1964, ‘Anti-Meeussen’s Rule’). If correct, this motivates three tonal classes in Ancient Greek: HL* in words like basiléˈàà ‘king.acc’(Sauzet 1989, Golston 1990) and two additional classes, H*L in basiˈléù ‘king.voc’and H in basiˈleús ‘king.nom’.

This paper discusses implications for generative theories of phonological idiosyncrasy, based on two vowel reduction patterns exhibited in Palauan. First, the process involves multiple degrees of idiosyncrasy; in cases of stress shift, vowels may surface faithfully, reduce to some unpredictable degree, or delete entirely. Second, the process involves unpredictability with respect to the patterning of tautomorphemic vowels with respect to hiatus resolution. We show that Palauan vowel reduction and hiatus resolution receive a parsimonious analysis in Gradient Harmonic Grammar (Smolensky & Goldrick 2016), a weighted constraint system in which individual segments and features are specified f..

The cross-linguistic tendency for contrast shifts to occur between some cues more than others has been investigated typologically and experimentally (Yang 2019), but with less attention in computational modeling. This paper adapts a human experimental paradigm (Kingston et al. 2008) to the speech perception component of a neural network model of sound change (Beguš 2020) to better understand how it processes acoustic cues in the context of Yang’s proposal that auditory dimensions affect which cues are more likely to undergo contrast shift. Piloting this neural network probing technique, I find evidence that the model integrates different pairs of English stop voicing cues than humans do, ..

Tetsǫ́t’ıné is a dialect of Dëne Sųłıné (ISO: CHP) spoken in Canada’s Northwest Territories. In Tetsǫ́t’ıné, prefix vowel length is subject to a complex set of conditions. The basic generalization is that when a consonant is deleted at the same level that a preceding prefix is added, a short vowel results; whereas when a prefix is added first, and an intervocalic consonant deletes at a later level, a long vowel results (Jaker 2022). This paper addresses two apparent counterexamples to this generalation—that is, cases of exceptional long and short vowels, which may be thought of as overapplication or underapplication of mora insertion. In optative paradigms, the con..

Robust Interpretive Parsing is a method of learning hidden structure with error-driven learning algorithms (Tesar and Smolensky 1998, 2000). When an algorithm makes an error while learning a word, it calculates what it considers to be the structural representation of the word (the “target parse”) and changes its grammar accordingly. Among potential directions of grammar change, it chooses the direction that best satisfies the current constraint ranking. However, this choice is problematic because the current constraint ranking is guaranteed to be erroneous: had it not been erroneous, an error would not have occurred in the first place. While this problem has been recognized conceptually ..

This paper investigates quantity-insensitive stress learning using the MaxEnt learner of Pater and Prickett (2022) and compares the performance of the learner equipped with three different constraint sets: a foot-based constraint set and two grid-based constraint sets, one drawn directly from Gordon (2002), and one that changes the formulation of the main stress constraint to match the foot-based learner. The learner equipped with the foot-based constraint set succeeds at learning all the languages from the Gordon (2002) typology that it can represent; the structural ambiguity of the foot-based representations is not a problem in this regard. The foot-based learner also learns the languages ..

Over the past two decades, theoretical linguistics has taken a probabilistic turn. Maximum entropy (ME) has been endorsed as a model of probabilistic phonology because of its classical guarantees for grammatical inference. Yet, little is known about the basic organizing principles of ME phonology beyond circumstantial evidence of ME’s ability to fit specific patterns of empirical frequencies. The study of ME typologies is difficult because they consist of infinitely many grammars that cannot be exhaustively listed and directly inspected. Uniform Probability Inequalities (Anttila and Magri 2018) are a new tool that solves the problem: they characterize cases where one phonological mapping h..

Transitive softening in Russian is a type of consonant mutation resulting from an underlying [CjV] cluster. There exist two closed classes of verbs where it occurs in the present tense in the absence of a clear source for a glide: five verbs with the thematic suffix ‑o‑, which can be illustrated by the verb kolótʲ ‘to stab’, and some 100 verbs with the thematic suffix ‑a‑, which can be illustrated by the verb pisátʲ ‘to write’. To explain how [o] and [a] end up as glides, I propose that the vowels in question change into their front counterparts as a result of the same process as that responsible for the stem ablaut in the verb molótʲ ‘to grind’ (1sg: melʲú). I ar..

In this paper, I present novel evidence supporting the claim that there are no right-edge infixes. Based on a typological survey, I demonstrate that all putative right-edge infixes only surface in languages with right-edge prosodic prominences. It is therefore possible to reanalyze all right-edge infixes as prominence-oriented infixes. Infixes, as a result, are highly asymmetric: they can occur in the left edge of a stem or in a prosodically prominent position, but nowhere else. To account for this asymmetric distribution, I propose that infix subcategorization is implemented by Anchor, rather than Alignment. Anchor has been previously argued to also be asymmetric (Nelson 2003), where it can..

Indexed constraints (like cophonologies) increase a grammar’s fit to seen data, but do they hurt the grammar’s ability to generalize to unseen data? We focus on French schwa deletion, an optional process whose rate of application is modulated by both phonological and lexical factors, and we propose three indexed constraint learners in the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) framework. Using data from Racine (2008), we test the ability of four learners to capture existing patterns and generalize to unseen data: three learners and a control MaxEnt learner without indexed constraint induction. The Indexed constraint learners indeed lead to better fit to the training data compared to the control. The r..