Linguistics

This book is about the nature of expression in speech. It is a comprehensive exploration of how such expression is produced and understood, and of how the emotional content of spoken words may be analysed, modelled, tested, and synthesized. Listeners can interpret tone-of-voice, assess emotional pitch, and effortlessly detect the finest modulations of speaker attitude; yet these processes present almost intractable difficulties to the researchers seeking to identify and understand them. In seeking to explain the production and perception of emotive content, the book reviews the potential of biological and cognitive models. It examines how the features that make up the speech production and perception systems have been studied by biologists, psychologists, and linguists, and assesses how far biological, behavioural, and linguistic models generate hypotheses that provide insights into the nature of expressive speech.

This book essentially argues for the importance of word frequency as a factor in the analysis and explanation of language structure. In other words, the roles of words and other linguistic phenomena such as morphology, phonology, and syntax are highly influenced by low, medium, or high frequency with which they occur. The book includes three decades of influential research in one thematic source. It provides an introductory overview that traces the development of thinking on this important subject. The discussion covers word frequency in lexical diffusion, morphophonemics, lexical and morphological conditioning of alternations using Spanish verbs as example, rules and schemas in the development and use of the English past tense, morphological classes as natural categories, regular morphology and lexicon, sequentiality as the basis of constituent structure, and mechanisms of change in grammaticization.

Exponence is the mapping of morphosyntactic structure to phonological representations, a research area which is not only the traditional bone of contention between phonology and morphology, but also approached in fundamentally diverse ways in different theoretical frameworks such as Optimality Theory and Distributed Morphology: by morphological rules carrying out complex phonological operations, highly abstract morphophonological representations, and/or by phonological constraints which are sensitive to morphological information. This volume presents a synopsis of the state-of-the-art in research on exponence, based on a novel conception: Every chapter systematically discusses a specific aspect of exponence from the point of view of current theoretical morphology, but also from a theoretical phonology perspective. Topics include nonconcatenative morphology, allomorphy, iconicity, dissimilation and truncation processes. Two detailed chapters formulate a new coherent research program for exponence which integrates the central insights of the last decades and provides important new challenges for years to come.

This book presents a cross-linguistic study of the phenomenon of infixation, typically associated in English with words like nullim-bloody-possiblenull, and found in all the world's major linguistic families. Infixation is a central puzzle in prosodic morphology: the book explores its prosodic, phonological, and morphological characteristics; considers its diverse functions, and formulates a general theory to explain the rules and constraints by which it is governed. The book examines 154 infixation patterns from over a hundred languages, including examples from Asia, Europe, Africa, New Guinea, and South America. It compares the formal properties of different kinds of infix, explores the range of diachronic pathways that lead to them, and considers the processes by which they are acquired in first language learning. A central argument of the book concerns the idea that the typological tendencies of language may be traced back to its origins and to the mechanisms of language transmission. The book thus combines the history of infixation with an exploration of the role diachronic and functional factors play in synchronic argumentation: it is an exemplary instance of the holistic approach to linguistic explanation.

This book presents insights on the phonology-morphology interface. It discusses a wide range of central theoretical issues, including the role of paradigms in synchronic grammars, and does so in the context of a wide variety of languages including several non-Indo-European languages. Paradigm uniformity has a long tradition in pre-generative linguistics but until recently played a minor role in theoretical phonology. Optimality Theory has drawn renewed attention to paradigmatic effects, formalized by constraints comparing the surface pronunciation of morphologically related words. The ten chapters in this book illustrate how a wide range of exceptions to regular phonological processes can be explained in this fashion. The chapters address such important theoretical questions as: do paradigms have a morphological base? If so, how is it defined? Why do paradigmatic effects hold for only certain subsets of words? In which areas of the grammar are paradigmatic effects likely to be found? The book discusses new data from the synchronic grammars of a wide variety of unrelated languages, including: Modern Hebrew, Chimwiini and Jita (Bantu), Halkomelem (Salish), Hungarian, and Arabic.

This book presents a treatment of a long-standing problem of Proto–Indo–European and Italic philology: the development of the Proto–Indo–European voiced aspirates in the ancient languages of Italy. In so doing it tackles a central issue of historical linguistics: the plausibility of explanations for sound change. The book argues that the problem can be resolved by combining a traditional philological investigation with experimental phonetics. Philological methods enable the presentation of the first integrated account of the evidence for the Italic languages, with detailed discussion of languages other than Latin. Theory and methods from experimental phonetics are then adopted to offer a new explanation for how the sound change might have taken place. At the same time, phonetic methods also confirm the traditional reconstruction of voiced aspirates for Proto–Indo–European. Thus the book offers a case-study of the successful application of synchronic theory and method to a problem of diachrony.

This volume endeavors to bridge one of the gaps between linguistic theory and the biological sciences by presenting a comprehensive view of phonology which simultaneously addresses linguists and those who from other fields who would like to make contact with phonological theory. It proposes a new theory of phonological computation using representations and operations informed by a broader biolinguistic perspective, breaking the human language externalization system into component parts and investigating their possible origins in cognitive abilities found throughout the animal kingdom. Issues discussed include phonology in evolutionary perspective, the role of phonology within a Minimalist conception of the language faculty, phonological operations and representations, arguments for parallel cyclicity across linguistic modules, the order of operations at the syntax/phonology interface, diachronic phonology, the role of language acquisition in language change, and the sources of linguistic variation.

The book presents a detailed comparative description of the phonological structure of Icelandic and Faroese and discusses problems in their analysis from a fairly broad theoretical perspective. The first part (Chapters 1–3) describes the historical relation between the languages and introduces some issues regarding their phonological analysis. Part II (Chapters 4–7) gives an overview of the segmental inventory of the two sound systems. Part III (Chapters 8–10) presents analyses of the syllable structure of the two languages and systemic relations between subsystems defined for different phonotactic positions. It also treats the rules for the distribution of long and short vowel nuclei. Part IV (Chapters 11–12) describes vocalic and consonantal morphophonemics, discussing the status, in inflectional paradigms and word formation, of umlaut and ablaut alternations and patterns such as those responsible for the distribution of preaspiration. Part V gives an overview of rhythmic relations in words and phrases in the two languages, ending with descriptions of intonational patterns in the two languages.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the phonology of Japanese, based on Japanese and Western materials and the author’s original research. It provides a rich source of materials and critical discussion of some current problems, reviewing previously published analyses and proposing solutions. Focussing on modern standard (Tôkyô) Japanese, with occasional excurses into major dialectical variations and historical backgrounds, the book offers both a critical synthesis of Japanese phonology and new analyses on some of its central features. Starting with the vowel inventory, the phonology of high vowel devoicing, insertion and elision, prosodic lengthening and shortening, and the status of diphthongs, it moves to the consonant system and the phonology of voicing, and to the so-called moraic segments. The chapter dedicated to the prosodic units provides a detailed and original analysis of the relation between the mora and syllable, one of the key issue of Japanese phonology, not to forget the foot and the prosodic word. It argues that the mora and the foot are sufficient for the comprehension and analysis of the phonology of Japanese. The final and longest chapter is devoted to accent, through descriptions and analyses of simplex and compound noun accentuation, default accentuation, the underlying accent of Sino-Japanese morphemes and that of numeral compounds to name just a few. It also addresses the question of the typological status of the Japanese accent in relation to tone.

This book illustrates an approach to prosodic typology through descriptions of the intonation and the prosodic structure of thirteen typologically different languages based on the same theoretical framework, the ‘autosegmental-metrical’ model of intonational phonology, and the transcription system of prosody known as ToBI (Tones and Break Indices). It is the first book introducing the history and principles of ToBI. It presents eleven ToBI systems ranging from European languages, Asian languages, an Australian aboriginal language, and an American Indian language, illustrating the flexibility and integrity of the ToBI system. The last chapter of the book proposes a model of prosodic typology based on two prosodic categories, prominence and rhythmic/prosodic unit.