Guest Editors' Note

Abstract

This special issue of Acta Linguistica Academica is the second volume of selected papers from the thirteenth Conference on Syntax, Phonology, and Language Analysis (SinFonIJA 13). An international linguistics conference, SinFonIJA is held annually at hosting institutions in the region of the former Yugoslavia and Austria-Hungary, and features work carried out in all areas of formal linguistics. SinFonIJA 13 was held at the Research Institute for Linguistics in Budapest (now the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics) in September 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference took place online, with talks and poster presentations delivered in real time.In the fall of 2020, Acta Linguistica Academica accepted our proposal for two special collections. The first volume appeared in December 2021 (Volume 68, Issue 4), and focused on contributions in syntax, morpho-syntax, and semantics. The present issue is the second of the two, and includes papers on phonology, phonetics, syntax, and semantics.In Unstressed vowels in English: Distributions and consequences, Péter Szigetvári builds on Trager & Bloch (1941) and Szigetvári ( 2016) and provides further evidence for the claim that diphthongs in (British) English are short vowels followed by consonants (glides). Novel evidence, presented in the paper, comes from the distribution of unstressed vowels in British English. Phenomena that are brought to bear on the analysis include the parallelism between the vocalic components of diphthongs and unstressable short vowels, and the realization of diphthongs in unstressed positions.Eirini Apostolopoulou in her paper Place of articulation shifts in sound change: A gradual road to the unmarked shows how markedness of codas is reduced in the diachronic development of Italiot Greek. The paper focuses on the changes that affect heterosyllabic clusters consisting of a non-coronal and a coronal consonant, and proposes three stages of change: (a) no shift; (b) DORSAL > LABIAL shift, and (c) DORSAL, LABIAL > CORONAL shift. The diachronic process is accounted for in terms of Rice's (1994) model of the PLACE node, de Lacy's (2002) markedness hierarchy, and Alber & Prince's (2015) Property Theory.Sebastian Bredemann's paper The role of phonology in Vata adjectival agreement provides novel evidence in favor of integrational theories of the morphology-phonology interface (e.g., Wolf 2008), as opposed to the separational ones (Halle and Marantz 1993). According to the former, the general phonology of a language can influence Vocabulary Insertion; according to the latter, Vocabulary Insertion does not interact with the phonological component of the grammar. The paper offers new evidence from adjectival agreement in Vata, where the shape of the agreement morpheme is determined by the phonology of the adjectival stem. This pattern can be straightforwardly accounted for under an integrational approachbut not a separational one.Kata Baditzné Pálvölgyi's paper Tonal peaks in the spontaneous speech of vantage level Hungarian learners of Spanish...

The emergence of conjunctions and phrasal coordination in Khanty

“…In contrast, co-compounds include no pitch reset or pauses, and carry the same pitch contour on both constituents, downstepped on the second one. This is shown in (46) and Figure 2. The prosodic facts lend support to the intuition that the sub-constituents of a co-compound are more tightly connected than overtly coordinated constituents.…”