for the published version, which has undergone additional copy-editing and typesetting. This paper documents and analyzes stress and vowel length in Samoan words. The domain of footing, the prosodic word, appears to be a root and a "close" (usually monosyllabic) suffix; prefixes and most disyllabic suffixes form a separate domain. Vowel sequences that disrupt the normal stress pattern require constraints matching sonority prominence to metrical prominence, sensitive to degree of mismatch and to the number of vowels involved. Two suffixes unexpectedly have an idiosyncratic footing constraint, observable only in a limited set of words. We also discuss trochaic shortening and its asymmetrical productivity, and marginal contrastiveness of some features in loans. While Samoan does not appear to be typologically unusual, it does offer arguments (i) in favour of alignment constraints on prosodic words rather than only on feet directly, and (ii) against simple cyclicity, and some of the strongest evidence for these arguments come from stress patterns of the rich inventory of vowel sequences phonotactically licit in Samoan. IntroductionThis paper describes and analyzes the word-level prosody of contemporary Samoan, an Austronesian language from the Independent State of Samoa and the (U.S.) Territory of American Samoa, with about 370,000 speakers in all countries (Ethnologue 2005). We focus on stress placement and vowel length.Samoan presents a case where morpheme boundaries disrupt a word's prosody, and mono-and disyllabic suffixes behave differently. Monosyllabic suffixes join the stem's footing domain, while prefixes and certain disyllabic suffixes do not. We also show that cyclicity alone doesn't suffice to explain stress in affixed words, and argue for ALIGN constraints requiring morphemes to initiate prosodic domains. In these respects, Samoan resembles other languages that have been analysed previously (see section 1), but we draw evidence not only from typical sequences of CV syllables, but also from Samoan's rich inventory of licit vowel sequences.These vowel sequences complicate patterns of stress assignment in Samoan. We show that some vowel sequences disrupt the normal stress pattern, requiring constraints on the association of sonority prominence and metrical prominence. These constraints must be sensitive both to the degree of prominence mismatch and to whether the mismatch is over a pair or a triplet of adjacent vowels. * We thank our primary consultant, John Fruean, and also Kare'l Lokeni for their many hours of work on this project. We also thank the other members of the UCLA 2007-2008 field methods class
The null subject (NS) stage is one of the best-described hallmarks of first language development. We present a series of experiments assessing children's interpretation of NS sentences, as a way of testing the two main competing analyses of the phenomenon: grammatical accounts, under which young children's grammars license NSs in declarative sentences; and performance accounts, which hold that children have an adult grammar, but omit subjects in production for extrasyntactic reasons. Overall, we find evidence of an NS stage in comprehension, just as in production. This suggests that child and adult grammars differ, in line with grammatical accounts.
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