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-oppositeside 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).
This chapter surveys the impact of language contact on phonological systems. The phonology of one language may influence that of another in several ways, including lexical borrowing, rule borrowing, Sprachbund features, and interlanguage effects. Illustrations of these phenomena are drawn from interactions between English and French, Hawaiian, and Japanese at different historical periods; from Quichean languages; from Slavic-influenced dialects of Albanian; from Dravidian influences on Sanskrit; and from South African English, among other examples. The evidence indicates that language contact may lead to various changes in phoneme inventory, phonotactics, and rule inventory, or to no change at all. Analyses of the data argue against the view that language contact invariably involves simplification but suggest that markedness is an important notion in accounting for certain features of interlanguages.
Substance-free phonology (SFP) is based on the hypothesis that phonological computation makes no reference to phonetic substance, and that phonological features are treated as arbitrary symbols for the purposes of computation. However, phonologists within the SFP tradition disagree about whether the content of phonological features is innate or learned (“emergent”), and if learned, whether the acquisition process is based on phonological patterning alone or refers to phonetic substance. In the present article we identify predictive differences between these accounts. We conclude that there is an innate basis to phonological features, but that featural content is not innate. We suggest that a hybrid phonetic-phonological approach to feature content acquisition may ultimately be the most successful.
Search & Copy (S&C) is a procedural model of vowel harmony in which underspecified vowels trigger searches for targets that provide them with features. In this paper, we seek to relate the S&C formalism with models of phonological locality proposed by recent work in the subregular program. Our goal is to provide a formal description, within the framework of mathematical linguistics, of the range of possible phonological transformations that admit an analysis within S&C. We show that used in its unidirectional mode, all transformations described by an S&C analysis can be modeled by tier-based input strictly local functions (TISL). This result improves the previous result of Gainor et al 2012, which showed that vowel harmony processes can be modeled by subsequential functions. However, non-TISL transformations can be given S&C descriptions in the following ways. Firstly, since TISL functions are not closed under composition, a non-TISL vowel harmony pattern may be obtained by applying two S&C rules sequentially. Secondly, when S&C is used in its bidirectional mode, it has the ability to describe transformations that cannot be modeled by finite-state functions.
This paper discusses cases where non-adjacent cells in morphological paradigms are syncretic, commonly called ABA patterns (Bobaljik 2012 et seqq.). Data from verbs in Germanic languages are examined, as earlier work suggests that a *ABA constraint may be active in this domain. It will be shown that there are verbs in several Germanic languages which exhibit genuine ABA patterns, precluding an analysis based on a constraint *ABA. It is suggested that the rarity of ABA patterns should instead be given a diachronic explanation in terms of Proto-Germanic conjugation classes. This approach is independently motivated by frequency asymmetries in modern Germanic languages, and correctly predicts where ABA patterns are more likely to appear. The research reported here adds to a rapidly-growing body of work on extralinguistic explanations for linguistic patterns (Anderson 2016), suggesting a severely reduced explanatory role for formal linguistic constraints.
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