Phonological words in the syntax and the lexicon: A study of Russian prepositions
Maria Gouskova
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004633
May 2019
Phonological words play a crucial role in phonology, but where exactly they are produced in syntax is not clear. I propose a theory whereby the syntax issues phonological word diacritics to the complex constituents it creates. Additionally, certain morphemes can be specified in the lexicon as possessing these diacritics. The phonology then interprets the diacritics—sometimes it ignores them, and other times, it makes phonological words to satisfy language-specific prosodic requirements. The resulting theory is demonstrated on the complex patterning of prepositions in Russian. The class of prepositions in Russian has certain syntactic traits in common, but there are many patterns where prepositions diverge according to their phonological word status. There are correlations between morphosyntactic structure and phonological word status: morphologically complex prepositions are always words. On the other hand, the presence of a morphological root, phonological size, and stress do not align with word status. The large range of phonological and morphosyntactic patterns involving prepositions in Russian demonstrates the need for an explicit and rich theory of word formation at the phonology-syntax interface.

Minimality and Onset Conditions Interact with Vowel Harmony in Fungwa
Samuel Akinbo
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004624
May 2019
This paper explores how the domain of vowel harmony can be affected by conditions involving minimality and the requirement for an onset within optimality theory (OT) framework. This work is based on the description and analysis of vowel harmony in Fungwa, an endangered Kainji, Benue-Congo (Niger state, Nigeria) language with about 1000 speakers. In Fungwa, the root vowels trigger backness harmony which targets the vowels of onsetful prefixes and clitics. However, this harmony does not target vowels of onsetless prefixes. In this work, I argue that prosodic word (PWd) is the domain vowel harmony, a minimality condition and an onset condition. The vowel of the onsetful prefixes and clitics undergoing harmony is as a result of the minimality condition which dictates the occurence of the onsetful prefixes and clitics in the PWd. However, the onset condition on PWd results in the misalignment of the onsetless prefixes with the PWd, which is the domain of harmony.

Tone slips in Cantonese: Evidence for early phonological encoding
John Alderete, Queenie Chan, H. Henny Yeung
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004622
May 2019
This article examines speech errors in Cantonese with the aim of fleshing out a larger speech production architecture for encoding phonological tone. A corpus was created by extracting 2,462 speech errors, including 668 tone errors, from audio recordings of natural conversations. The structure of these errors was then investigated in order to distinguish two contemporary approaches to tone in speech production. In the tonal frames account, tone is encoded like metrical stress, represented in abstract structural frames for a word. Because tone cannot be mis-selected in tonal frames, tone errors are expected to be rare and non-contextual, as observed with stress. An alternative is that tone is actively selected in phonological encoding like phonological segments. This approach predicts that tone errors will be relatively common and exhibit the contextual patterns observed with segments, like perseveration and anticipation. In our corpus, tone errors are the second most common type of error, and the majority of errors exhibit contextual patterns that parallel segmental errors. Building on prior research, a two-stage model of phonological tone encoding is proposed, following the patterns seen in tone errors: Tone is phonologically selected concurrently with segments, but then sequentially assigned after segments to a syllable.

The many faces of uniformitarianism in linguistics
George Walkden
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004613
May 2019
The notion of uniformitarianism, originally borrowed into linguistics from the earth sciences, is widely considered to be a foundational principle in modern historical linguistics. However, there are almost as many interpretations of uniformitarianism as there are historical linguists who take the time to define the notion. In this paper I argue, following Gould (1965; 1987), that this confusion results from the fact that uniformitarianism as originally proposed in geology is not itself a uniform notion, and permits at least four readings. Only some of these readings involve substantive claims rather than methodological imperatives, and only some of these readings are useful for the study of language change. The weakest conclusion to be drawn is that these distinct notions need to be kept apart when invoked by historical linguists.

Sanskrit n-Retroflexion is Input-Output Tier-Based Strictly Local
Thomas Graf, Connor Mayer
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004610
October 2018
Sanskrit /n/-retroflexion is one of the most complex segmental processes in phonology. While it is still star-free, it does not fit in any of the subregular classes that are commonly entertained in the literature. We show that when construed as a phonotactic dependency, the process fits into a class we call input-output tier-based strictly local (IO-TSL), a natural extension of the familiar class TSL. IO-TSL increases the power of TSL’s tier projection function by making it an input-output strictly local transduction. Assuming that /n/-retroflexion represents the upper bound on the complexity of segmental phonology, this shows that all of segmental phonology can be captured by combining the intuitive notion of tiers with the independently motivated machinery of strictly local mappings.

Proceedings of Form and Analysis in Mayan Linguistics 5 (FAMLi 5)
Ryan Bennett, Robert Henderson, Pedro Mateo Pedro, Megan Harvey
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004595
April 2019
This document publishes papers from the proceedings of the 5th meeting of Form and Analysis in Mayan Linguistics (FAMLi 5), which took place Aug. 10-11, 2018 in Antigua, Guatemala. We thank the UMD Language Science Center and Guatemala Field Station and Cooperación Española for providing financial and logistical support for the conference, and all of the conference participants who helped make the event a success. See https://escholarship.org/uc/lrc_famli5<U+200B> for archived access to individual articles and full citation information.

What indexical shift sounds like: Uyghur intonation and interpreting speech reports
Travis Major, Connor Mayer
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004591
May 2019
Recent years have given rise to a considerable amount of research on exceptional behaviors of indexicals (e.g., I, you, here, there, etc.) in embedded contexts, a phenomenon referred to as indexical shift. This paper provides a novel field methodology for diagnosing indexical shift, by eliciting target sentences in controlled discourse contexts and analyzing the prosody of the elicited utterances. This is less cumbersome for consultants than standard semantic diagnostics, and allows for more detailed empirical description. We demonstrate this by investigating indexical shift in Uyghur. In addition to providing a more complete empirical picture, we suggest a modification to the analysis of Uyghur indexical shift proposed by Shklovsky and Sudo (2014). Applying these methods to other languages with indexical shift has the potential to further improve both our empirical and theoretical understanding of the phenomenon.

The intervocalic palatal glide in Cognitive Phonetics
Veno Volenec, Charles Reiss
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004582
May 2019
This study addresses a puzzle in Croatian regarding the fate of the underlying palatal glide in intervocalic position. Approaching the puzzle from the perspective of Cognitive Phonetics (CP), we advance two claims: First, output phonological representations consisting of features are not directly interpretable by the articulatory system; rather, the interface between the phonology and the articulatory system is mediated by a universal transduction system. Second, the main units of speech production are transduced phonological features, and not segments, syllables, or articulatory gestures.

The phonology, phonetics, and diachrony of Sturtevant’s Law
Anthony Yates
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004571
April 2019
This paper presents a systematic reassessment of STURTEVANT’S LAW (Sturtevant 1932), which governs the differing outcomes of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) voiced and voiceless obstruents in Hittite (Anatolian). I argue that STURTEVANT’S LAW was a conditioned 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 provide empirical and typological support for this novel restriction, which is shown not only to account straightforwardly for data that is problematic under previous analyses, 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 PIE system as traditionally reconstructed (contra Kloekhorst 2016, Jäntti 2017).

Phonological teamwork in Kalahari Basin languages
Florian Lionnet
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004555
December 2018
This paper describes the complex, multiple-trigger, cumulative assimilation processes targeting the initial vowel (V1) of bimoraic stems in Kalahari Basin languages (KBA), first described by Anthony Traill (1985) in East ?Xoon (Tuu). The focus is on two languages: East ?Xoon and G?ui (Khoe-Kwadi). The goal is to describe these processes in as much detail as is possible from the available published and unpublished sources. Marked differences between the two languages in focus are brought to light, thus giving an idea of the so far unnoticed diversity of V1 realization in KBA languages. Finally, this paper briefly highlights important problems posed by such cumulative processes to phonological theory, many of which had already been identified by Traill (1985).