Unbounded Stress in Subregular Phonology
Sophie Hao, Samuel Andersson
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004642
June 2019
This paper situates culminative unbounded stress systems within the subregular hierarchy for functions. While Baek (2018) has argued that such systems can be uniformly understood as input tier-based strictly local constraints, we show here that default-to-opposite-side and default-to-same-side stress systems belong to distinct subregular classes when they are viewed as functions that assign primary stress to underlying forms. While the former system can be captured by input tier-based input strictly local functions, a subsequential function class that we define here, the latter system is not subsequential, though it is weakly deterministic according to McCollum et al.’s (2018) non-interaction criterion. Our results motivate the extension of recently proposed subregular language classes to subregular functions and argue in favor of McCollum et al.’s definition of weak determinism over that of Heinz and Lai (2013).

Vowel duration and the voicing effect across English dialects
James Tanner, Morgan Sonderegger, Jane Stuart-Smith, SPADE Data Consortium
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004640
June 2019
The ‘voicing effect’—the durational difference in vowels preceding voiced and voiceless consonants—is a well-documented phenomenon in English, where it plays a key role in the production and perception of the English final voicing contrast. Despite this supposed importance, little is known as to how robust this effect is in spontaneous connected speech, which is itself subject to a range of linguistic factors. Similarly, little attention has focused on variability in the voicing effect across dialects of English, bar analysis of specific varieties. Our findings show that the voicing of the following consonant exhibits a weaker-than-expected effect in spontaneous speech, interacting with manner, vowel height, speech rate, and word frequency. English dialects appear to demonstrate a continuum of potential voicing effect sizes, where varieties with dialect-specific phonological rules exhibit the most extreme values. The results suggest that the voicing effect in English is both substantially weaker than previously assumed in spontaneous connected speech, and subject to a wide range of dialectal variability.

Phonotactic restrictions and morphology in Aymara
Gillian Gallagher, Maria Gouskova, Gladys Camacho Rios
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004635
November 2018
Nonlocal phonological interactions are often sensitive to morphological domains. Bolivian Aymara restricts the cooccurrence of plain, ejective, and aspirated stops within, but not across, morphemes. We document these restrictions in a morphologically parsed corpus of Aymara. We further present two experiments with native Aymara speakers. In the first experiment, speakers are asked to repeat nonce words that should be interpreted as monomorphemic. Speakers are more accurate at repeating nonce words that respect the nonlocal phonotactic restrictions than nonce words that violate them. In a second experiment, some nonce words are interpetable as morphologically complex, while others suggest a monomorphemic parse. Speakers show a sensitivity to this difference, and repeat the words more accurately when they can be interpreted as having a morpheme boundary between two consonants that tend to not cooccur inside a morpheme. Finally, we develop a computational model that induces nonlocal representations from the baseline grammar. The model posits projections when it notices that certain segments often cooccur when separated by a morpheme boundary. The model generates a full Maximum Entropy phonotactic grammar, which makes distinctions between attested and rare/unattested sequences in a way that aligns with the speaker behavior.

Inducing nonlocal constraints from baseline phonotactics
Maria Gouskova, Gillian Gallagher
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004634
February 2019
Nonlocal phonological patterns such as vowel harmony and long-distance consonant assimilation and dissimilation motivate representations that include only the interacting segments—projections. We present an implemented computational learner that induces projections based on phonotactic properties of a language that are observable without nonlocal representations. The learner builds on the base grammar induced by the MaxEnt Phonotactic Learner (Hayes and Wilson 2008). Our model searches this baseline grammar for constraints that suggest nonlocal interactions, capitalizing on the observations that (a) nonlocal interactions can be seen in trigrams if the language has simple syllable structure, and (b) nonlocally interacting segments define a natural class. We show that this model finds nonlocal restrictions on laryngeal consonants in corpora of Quechua and Aymara, and vowel co-occurrence restrictions in Shona.

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.