Gradient behavior without gradient underlying representations: the case of French liaison
Benjamin Storme
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004876
November 2019
French liaison consonants are challenging for phonological theory because they pattern ambiguously between word-initial and word-final consonants. In recent works, these facts have been used to motivate different underlying representations for liaison consonants and non-liaison consonants. This paper argues that this move is not necessary. The gradient behavior of liaison consonants can indeed be derived through constraint interaction while maintaining that liaison consonants and non-liaison consonants have the same underlying representation. Two independently motivated hypotheses will play a key role in deriving this result: (i) word variants strive to be similar to their citation forms via output-output correspondence and (ii) concatenating two words (word 1 and word 2) has phonetic/phonological consequences on word 1’s final segment and on word 2’s initial segment. Together with the fact that liaison consonants are absent from the citation forms of liaison words, these hypotheses predict that liaison consonants will be less protected against changes than stable word-final consonants but more protected than word-initial consonants, thus explaining their gradient behavior. The analysis is illustrated with a detailed case study on Quebec French affrication combining corpus data and grammatical modeling.

English phonology and morphology
Samuel Ahmed, Samuel Andersson, Bert Vaux
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004868
October 2019
We ilustrate the complexity and interest of English phonology and morphology through two case studies: the phonological and morphological behavior of sibilant suffixes, and the aspiration of voiceless obstruents. We focus on documenting individual variation in these areas and examining theoretical proposals that have been advanced to account for the attested range of variation that is found, highlighting cases where the data connect to larger issues in phonological and morphological theory.

Plant Series, No. 3. Manuscript MS408.
Gerard Cheshire
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004864
November 2019
The plants individually described in Manuscript MS408 have all been identified as species from the environs of the Mediterranean Basin, in accordance with the location of origin for the manuscript. This series of papers presents each plant species separately with a translation of its accompanying text and any relevant cross-reference information. In addition to the linguistic value, there is plenty of historical, cultural and scientific knowledge to be gleaned from each of these manuscript pages, so they will be of interest to scholars from various disciplines.

The effect of focus prominence on phrasing
Michael Wagner, Michael Mcauliffe
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004863
October 2019
Prosody simultaneously encodes different kinds of information about an utterance, including the type of speech act (which, in English, often affects the choice of int
onational tune), the syntactic constituent structure (which mainly affects prosodic phrasing), and the location of semantic focus (which mainly affects the relative p
rosodic prominence between words). The syntactic and semantic functional dimensions (speech act, constituency, focus) are orthogonal to each other, but to which exten
t their prosodic correlates are remains controversial. This paper reports on a production experiment that crosses these three dimensions to look for interactions, con
centrating on interactions between focus prominence and phrasing. The results provide evidence that interactions are more limited than many current theories of senten
ce prosody would predict, and support a theory that keeps different prosodic dimensions representationally separate.

Plant Series, No. 2. Manuscript MS408.
Gerard Cheshire
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004845
October 2019
The plants individually described in Manuscript MS408 have all been identified as species from the environs of the Mediterranean Basin, in accordance with the location of origin for the manuscript. This series of papers presents each plant species separately with a translation of its accompanying text and any relevant cross-reference information. In addition to the linguistic value, there is plenty of historical, cultural and scientific knowledge to be gleaned from each of these manuscript pages, so they will be of interest to scholars from various disciplines.

Sound Structure and Sound Change: A modeling approach
Rebecca Morley
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004842
September 2019
Research in linguistics, as in most other scientific domains, is usually approached in a modular way – narrowing the domain of inquiry in order to allow for increased depth of study. This is necessary and productive for a topic as wide-ranging and complex as human language. However, precisely because language is a complex system, tied to perception, learning, memory, and social organization, the assumption of modularity can also be an obstacle to understanding language at a deeper level. The methodological focus of this work is on computational modeling, highlighting two aspects of modeling work that receive relatively little attention: the formal mapping from model to theory, and the scalability of demonstration models. A series of implemented models of sound change are analyzed in this way. As theoretical inconsistencies are discovered, possible solutions are proposed, incrementally constructing a set of sufficient properties for a working model. Because internal theoretical consistency is enforced, this model corresponds to an explanatorily adequate theory. And because explicit links between modules are required, this is a theory, not only of sound change, but of many aspects of phonological competence.

Transparency, locality, and contrast in Uyghur backness harmony
Adam McCollum
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004839
October 2019
Theories of vowel harmony have wrestled with the formal challenges of transparency, notably the increased expressivity of non-local dependencies. However, experimental work has demonstrated on a number of occasions that ‘transparent’ vowels actually undergo harmony (e.g. Gick, Pulleyblank, Campbell, & Mutaka, 2006), re-establishing the role of locality in the analysis of harmony. Transparency has also been shown to be constrained by count effects – a single token of a vowel may be transparent but multiple tokens are not (Hayes & Londe, 2006; Ringen & Kontra, 1989). However, existing work on backness harmony in Uyghur argues that harmony truly skips the high front vowel /i/ and is unaffected by multiple tokens of transparent /i/. This paper examines the distribution of [i] and [?] within roots and suffixes to assess their phonological status, as well as their participation in harmony. Results indicate there are no transparent vowels in Uyghur, as [i] and [?] regularly alternate for harmony. This finding is interpreted as further support for the role of locality in harmony more generally.

Metrical Grids and Generalized Tier Projection
Sophie Hao
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004837
October 2019
This paper formalizes metrical grid theory (MGT, Prince, 1983; Hayes, 1995) and studies its expressive power. I show that MGT analyses of a certain form can describe stress systems beyond the input tier-based input strictly local functions proposed by Hao and Andersson (2019), but conjecture that such analyses do not describe systems beyond the input tier-based strictly local languages of Baek (2018). These results reveal fundamental differences between the three formalisms.

Phonotactic learning with neural language models
Connor Mayer, Max Nelson
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004834
October 2019
Computational models of phonotactics share much in common with language models, which assign probabilities to sequences of words. While state of the art language models are implemented using neural networks, phonotactic models have not followed suit. We present several neural models of phonotactics, and show that they perform favorably when compared to existing models. In addition, they provide useful insights into the role of representations on phonotactic learning and generalization. This work provides a promising starting point for future modeling of human phonotactic knowledge.