Theoretical Phonology Research Articles

Weak determinism and the computational consequences of interaction

Recent work has claimed that (non-tonal) phonological patterns are subregular (Heinz 2011a,b, 2018; Heinz and Idsardi 2013), occupying a delimited proper subregion of the regular functions—the weakly deterministic (WD) functions (Heinz and Lai 2013; Jardine 2016). Whether or not it is correct (McCollum et al. 2020a), this claim can only be properly assessed given a complete and accurate definition of WD functions. We propose such a definition in this article, patching unintended holes in Heinz and Lai’s (2013) original definition that we argue have led to the incorrect classification of some phonological patterns as WD. We start from the observation that WD patterns share a property that we call unbounded semiambience, modeled after the analogous observation by Jardine (2016) about non-deterministic (ND) patterns and their unbounded circumambience. Both ND and WD functions can be broken down into compositions of deterministic (subsequential) functions (Elgot and Mezei 1965; Heinz and Lai 2013) that read an input string from opposite directions; we show that WD functions are those for which these deterministic composands do not interact in a way that is familiar from the theoretical phonology literature. To underscore how this concept of interaction neatly separates the WD class of functions from the strictly more expressive ND class, we provide analyses of the vowel harmony patterns of two Eastern Nilotic languages, Maasai and Turkana, using bimachines, an automaton type that represents unbounded bidirectional dependencies explicitly. These analyses make clear that there is interaction between deterministic composands when (and only when) the output of a given input element of a string is simultaneously dependent on information from both the left and the right: ND functions are those that involve interaction, while WD functions are those that do not.

On competing indexicalities in southern Peninsular Spanish. A sociophonetic and perceptual analysis of affricate [ts] through time

AbstractThis paper examines linguistic, cognitive, and social factors in the development of an ongoing sound change in Andalusian Spanish related to the crosslinguistically well-known process of syllable coda lenition. The resyllabification of word internal /-s/ when followed by dental plosive /t/, in words such aslingüística[liŋ⋅ˈgujs⋅ti⋅ka] ‘linguistics’ realized as [liŋ⋅ˈguj⋅tsi⋅ka], results in an affricate sound [ts] that may be indexed in different ways within the speech community. Findings are reported from a trend study of two sample surveys separated by a twenty-year time gap, acoustic analysis, and two perception experiments. Acoustic phonetics, historical linguistics, theoretical phonology, and sociolinguistic studies provide the theoretical background to help explain the development of this sound change and its connection with other phonological features of Andalusian Spanish. Development of the affricate allophone is a natural outcome consistent with universal constraints boosted by the recent emergence of a regional koine, where its indexicality is undetermined.

Sound symbolism and theoretical phonology

AbstractA received wisdom in modern linguistic theories is that the relationships between sounds and meanings are generally arbitrary. However, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that in some cases sounds and meanings have systematic relationships—patterns known as “sound symbolism.” Yet most of these studies are conducted by psychologists, cognitive scientists, or cognitive linguists, and currently, only a few theoretical phonologists pay serious attention to sound symbolism. This paper reviews major studies on sound symbolism and argues that sound symbolism can be an interesting topic of exploration for theoretical phonologists. This paper also demonstrates that insights gained by phonological research can shed light on some important issues in the studies of sound symbolism, and vice versa. Overall, I hope that this paper is informative for both theoretical phonologists and researchers who work on sound symbolism.

Sound symbolism and theoretical phonology

Sound symbolism and theoretical phonology

Concreteness in General Phonology: Evidence from French by Bernard Tranel

Reviewed by: Concreteness in General Phonology: Evidence from French by Bernard Tranel Amanda Dalola Tranel, Bernard. Concreteness in General Phonology: Evidence from French. UP of California, 2018. ISBN 978-0-52030-398-0. Pp. 338. Tranel's book challenges several widespread theories in French phonology and morphology from within the generative framework. Focusing on the status of nasal vowels, [Ø]~[C] alternations, the status of final schwas and the treatment of h-aspiréinitial words, this research argues methodically against a purely phonological analysis driven by economy and distant underlying and surface forms, in favor of one driven by psychological plausibility which takes into consideration relevant grammatical and lexical information. The text proceeds across three main sections—one focusing each on nasal vowels, final consonants, and protective schwa/h-aspiré words. Within each [End Page 189] section, a repeating structure propels the narrative forward: discussion first underlines the main issues in each phenomenon and summarizes the claims of previous treatments, before offering a critical review—always through the presentation of additional data which introduce complications to previous assumptions—and an alternative account able to reconcile all forms. It is in this way that we are presented with sizeable evidence to support the three groundbreaking ideas of the text: a) nasal vowels have not historically been phonologically derivable from/VN/sequences and should, therefore, be viewed as lexical in nature; b) the postulation of final schwas is unnecessary from a structural standpoint because they have no phonetic reflexes and are not naturally learnable; c) h-aspiré words are most elegantly analyzed by means of rule features, instead of the consideration of syllable boundaries or abstract lexical initial consonants. The text's comprehensive approach will appeal cross-generationally to armchair and lab phonologists alike, while the extensive example sets will delight Francophones, dictation enthusiasts, and everyone in between. The stand-alone nature of the three main parts makes the book easily digestible in chapters or as separate case studies, and the thorough treatment of previous theoretical accounts makes it optimal training ground for undergraduate and graduate students making their first foray into French phonology. Experienced linguists will also appreciate the author's appeal to plausibility based on psychological reality, a cutting-edge concept in theoretical phonology back in the early 1980s, but one that went on to become mainstream in the field in the 1990s and 2000s via the extension of Exemplar Theory. Poised to become/remain required reading for all those with interests in the French language's idiosyncratic and oftentimes complicated sound behavior, this edgy and timeless title more than retains its shine. Amanda Dalola University of South Carolina Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

The Database of Eurasian Phonological Inventories: a research tool for distributional phonological typology

Abstract The paper presents an overview of The Database of Eurasian Phonological Inventories—a new information resource and analytical tool for research in the field of distributional phonological typology, theoretical phonology, and areal linguistics.

Phonological typology by Matthew K. Gordon

Reviewed by: Phonological typology by Matthew K. Gordon Paul V. de Lacy Phonological typology. By Matthew K. Gordon. (Oxford surveys in phonology and phonetics.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. ix, 363. ISBN 9780199669011. $50. Gordon’s Phonological typology (PT) is a survey of the crosslinguistic variation found in selected phonological phenomena. There is an emphasis throughout on explaining such variation, resulting in a book that is highly theoretically informed. There are also many discussions of within-language frequency of phonological categories—something rarely found in work of this type. Overall, PT is a masterful work, written by a highly qualified author: G has many publications in theoretical phonology and has presented extensive typological research as evidence for his theories. It is important to say what PT is not. It does not propose any new theories, and it is not a textbook. PT is also not a handbook—it does not provide deep exploration of individual topics. Instead, PT bridges the gap between a textbook and a handbook: it provides an overview of topics and serves as a jumping-off point for deeper study in either handbooks or original sources. Accordingly, much of the book presupposes a strong foundation in phonological theory, so undergraduates would find it very difficult, if not impossible, to understand the discussions without help. While it is a survey, PT is not merely a catalogue of generalizations. There is continual emphasis on explanation, and on the many sources of explanation for typological asymmetries, with an excellent overview in Ch. 2. PT presents constant reminders that theories play a necessary role in typological exploration. PT also has a social goal: to encourage better communication between typologists and theoretical phonologists. Over the past three decades, a great deal of work in theoretical phonology has involved typological research, often driven by predictions of proposals expressed in optimality theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 2004). At the same time, phonology has been less prominent among typologists, leading to what G calls ‘the impoverished position of phonology in typology’ (5; see also Hyman 2007). PT provides a way for typologists to gain quick insight into the crosslinguistic variation of many phonological phenomena, as well as to understand theoreticians’ motivations for their typological work. In a sense, PT is a theoretician reaching out to typologists. To a lesser extent, it also encourages theoreticians to take note of work in typology; PT discusses many databases and descriptions that will help inform theoretical work. By contrast, PT does not provide extensive discussion of the methods used by typologists in their work—not even on such basic issues as how to provide a balanced sample of languages in a typology, and how such balancing might be relevant to theoreticians. So, while PT is a bridge between typologists and theoreticians, it is mainly one-way. I believe PT will be at its most useful in advanced undergraduate phonology classes and introductory graduate courses. The chapters cover syllables, segmental processes, stress, tone and intonation, [End Page 481] and prosodic morphology. All presuppose familiarity with fundamental phonological concepts; some basic information is provided, but it is rather telegraphic (e.g. the one-page introduction to the syllable: pp. 83–84). In other words, students should be provided with a strong understanding of the syllable before tackling PT’s ‘syllable’ chapter, and the same advice applies for every other chapter in the book. Each chapter is fairly self-contained, and so chapters could be profitably assigned as individual readings. For the student, the value of each chapter is that it provides a high-level overview of broad topics, but with enough depth to identify interesting aspects, and adequate references to launch the student toward deeper exploration. A great strength of the book is its focus on within-language frequency. For example, there is discussion of the within-language relative frequency of short vs. long vowels, singleton vs. geminate consonants, geminate consonants of various manners of articulation, syllable types, and many others (52ff.). It is rare to see such within-language relative frequencies discussed, even though—as G notes—they often follow the same patterns as found crosslinguistically. Any survey faces a basic conundrum: breadth or depth? In terms of...

Can we use rendaku for phonological argumentation?

AbstractThis paper addresses the general issue of the quality of phonological data, using rendaku as a case study. Rendaku is a widely-discussed voicing process that accompanies compound formation in Japanese. The issue of the quality of phonological data has been discussed from time to time from various perspectives throughout the history of phonological research, and we are recently witnessing renewed interest in this topic. This paper takes up rendaku as a case study to address this issue. Rendaku has been used to argue for many theoretical devices, but it is rarely acknowledged in the theoretical literature that rendaku involves extensive lexical irregularity. The specific question addressed in this study is whether it is appropriate to use rendaku for phonological argumentation. The answer that this paper proposes is yes, but the more crucial lesson is that theoretical phonology should evaluate the quality of phonological data more explicitly. The current discussion offers a first step toward establishing general guidelines about what kind of evidence can be used to decide whether a pattern under question is phonological or not.

Reconsidering the Derivational Prefix of the Biblical Hebrew t-Stems through Feature Geometry

A recent publication (Hutton 2011) provided evidence and phonological rationale for Baden’s assertion (2010) that the derivational prefix of the Biblical Hebrew hitpaʿʿēl stem could assimilate not only to the normally recognized ‘dentals’ (t, d, and ṭ), but also, in certain ad hoc circumstances, to the affricates (s, z, and ṣ) and, eventually, to other classes of segments. This paper analyzes the process from the theoretical standpoint of feature geometry. An analysis informed by theoretical phonology suggests that the underlying derivational phoneme *t was unspecified with respect to voice and some other features. When this underspecified phoneme *t was placed in immediate contact with a segment exhibiting the same place of articulation and manner specifications, it was occasionally linked to the pharyngeal node of the following segment on an ad hoc basis. Along with commonly operational default rules, this linkage helps to explain cases wherein derivational *t assimilated to members of the set of coronal stops and affricates {d, ṭ [t ʕ ], s [ts], z [dz], and ṣ [ts ʕ ]}. Moreover, in a narrow set of instances, the segment *t was linked to the nasal articulator node of the following coronal /n/, or to the root node of a few other coronal phonemes (š [s], and possibly ś [ɬ] and l). Over time, these linkages proceeded up the feature tree as the feature spreading was increasingly generalized. This finding is basically consistent with the proposals laid out in Baden 2010 and Hutton 2011, but augments them slightly, providing a more unified, economical, and principled explanation.

Acoustic testing for phonologization

AbstarctExamination of phonetic data can show when phonologization has or has not occurred. Under the general Economy assumption of generative linguistics, this is important for theoretical phonology, since only cases where it has occurred require a phonological account. A modular view of phonetics and phonology is assumed, as it is clearly consistent with generative theory. A procedure for acoustic phonetic testing for phonologization is illustrated using data from one speaker of Palestinian Arabic and one speaker of Stát'imcets Salish. The testing can confirm phonological accounts or cause their revision. How it can cause revision is illustrated with the Stát'imcets data: the speaker's retraction harmony affects a rightward vowel, which is unexpected from standard descriptions of the harmony in that language. The testing can also identify cases of phonetics-within-language. This is illustrated with the St'at'imcets speaker's schwa lowering.

Issues in the Analysis of Chinese Tone

AbstractChinese tone has played an important role in the development of phonological theory from distinctive features and autosegmental phonology to Optimality Theory and its various adaptations. This article reviews some past and current issues in the analysis of Chinese tone and points out how the development of theoretical phonology has shaped the highs and lows of this research enterprise. To fruitfully proceed into the future, I plead to phonologists working in this area to cultivate a new respect for empirical data based on well‐designed phonetic and psycholinguistic studies. This is necessitated by the observations that speakers’ knowledge of tone and tone sandhi may not be identical to their patterns in the lexicon, and impressionistic transcriptions, no matter how careful, can be inaccurate. Moreover, patterns of tone in Chinese are rich in variation, gradience, and exceptions due to dialectal contact and the influence from the dominant Standard Chinese, and existing research has shown that the productivity of Chinese tone sandhi patterns is influenced by both categorical factors such as phonological opacity and gradient factors such as the phonetic nature and the frequency of usage of the sandhi. An empirical basis built around these issues will allow the study of Chinese tone to make continued contributions to the development of phonological theory and our understanding of speakers’ phonological knowledge.

Tone: Is it Different?

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2007) • DRAFT prepared for The Handbook of Phonological Theory, 2nd Ed., Blackwell (John Goldsmith, Jason Riggle & Alan Yu, eds) • Comments welcome Tone: Is it Different? Larry M. Hyman University of California, Berkeley Introduction Except for a brief period in the late 1970s and early 1980s, tone has generally fallen outside the central concerns of theoretical phonology. During that period, the concepts and formalisms of Goldsmith’s (1976a,b) autosegmental approach to tone provided the model to address other aspects of “non-linear phonology” including vowel harmony (Clements 1977, 1981), nasal harmony (Hyman 1982), and feature geometry (Clements 1985, Sagey 1986). In addition, autosegmental approaches to templatic morphology (McCarthy 1981), reduplication (Marantz 1982), and other aspects of “prosodic morphology” owed their inspiration to tone, which through the work of Pulleyblank (1986) provided important insights into the developing framework of lexical phonology and morphology (Kiparsky 1982, 1985; Mohanan 1986). Most generative work prior to and during this period had centered around African tone systems (Leben 1973a, Hyman & Schuh 1974, Goldsmith 1976, Clements & Ford 1979, Clements & Goldsmith’s 1984), two notable exceptions being Haraguchi (1977) and Yip (1980), who dealt with the tonal dialectology of Japanese and Chinese, respectively. Finally, Pierrehumbert (1980) developed an influential autosegmental approach to intonation based on English, which was subsequently applied to Japanese (Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986) and many other languages since. While the autosegmental legacy is still quite alive, tone has not contributed as centrally to subsequent theoretical innovations in phonology. In the case of optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993, McCarthy 2002), there have been some interesting applications, e.g. Myers’ (1997) treatment of the obligatory contour principle (OCP), but theoretical developments have largely been based either on segmental phonology or on stress, syllabification, reduplication and other aspects of prosodic phonology and morphology. My goal in writing this chapter is twofold. First, I propose to cover some of the aforementioned contributions that tone has made to phonological theory. Second, I wish to show that there is still much more for phonologists and others to learn from tone. I suggest that linguists should be very concerned about tone, for at least three reasons: (i) Tone systems are found in approximately 50% of the languages of the world. The greatest concentrations of “tone languages” are found in Sub-Saharan Africa, East and Southeast Asia, Southcentral Mexico, and parts of Amazonia and New Guinea. While we have had access to information about the first three areas for some time, comparatively little has been available on tone in Amazonia and New Guinea until recently. The emerging picture is that these tone sytems have interesting and diverse properties which complement the already varied African, Asian, and Mexican systems. The result is an extraordinary richness and a potential gold mine for future investigations. (ii) The study of tone has influenced the history of phonology and promises to contribute further to our understanding of language in general, particular as concerns interface issues. For instance, some of the most detailed and influential studies concerning the syntax-phonology

On the use of Evolutionary Phonology for phonological theory

Theoretical phonology centrally focuses on representing the implicit knowledge that speakers have of the sound patterns in their language, as Blevins (this volume) points out on the first page of her synopsis. Equally important, according to Blevins, is it to provide explanations for the dis- tribution of sound patterns across attested spoken languages. While this has been aimed at in numerous studies in dierent frameworks, Blevins mentions Generative Phonology and Optimality Theory in this context, the alternatively proposed Evolutionary Phonology (henceforth: EP) is claimed to dier from previous work in maintaining a principled distinc- tion between phonological and extra-phonological explanations for sound patterns. For this purpose, EP focuses on diachronic processes and tests the hypothesis that ''regular phonetically based sound change is the com- mon source of recurrent sound patterns'' (p. 2). In the following I argue that EP is only of limited use for phonological theory. I focus on Blevins' criticism of alternative accounts (§2), EP's sup- posed simplification of phonological theory by ascribing the occurrence of typological patterns to sound change (§3), and a short description of the grammar model by Boersma (§4), which follows restrictions similar to those posed in EP.

A theoretical synopsis of Evolutionary Phonology

Phonology is the study of sound patterns of the world’s languages. In all spoken languages, we find sound patterns characterizing the composition of words and phrases. These patterns include overall properties of contrastive sound inventories (e.g. vowel inventories, consonant inventories, tone inventories), as well as patterns determining the distribution of sounds or contrastive features of sounds (stress, tone, length, voicing, place of articulation, etc.), and their variable realization in di¤erent contexts (alternations). A speaker’s implicit knowledge of these patterns is often evident in their extension to novel items and in experiments probing phonological well-formedness. This implicit knowledge – its content, formalization, and representation, – is the central focus of modern theoretical phonology, including generative phonology and many of its derivatives (natural phonology, government phonology, dependency phonology, optimality theory). However, just as important as speaker’s implicit knowledge of sound patterns are explanations for the distribution of sound patterns across attested spoken languages. Some sound patterns, are extremely common, while others are rare. Some examples of recurrent sound patterns involving segment/feature inventories, distribution, and alternations are listed in (1). The sound patterns in (1i, iii, iv, v, viii) are exceptionless across the world’s attested spoken languages, while those in (1ii, vi, vii, ix–xii) are recurrent and frequent. Exceptionlesss patterns like (1i) are sometimes regarded as ‘linguistic universals’ (1i), while common patterns like (1ii) are often viewed as ‘universal tendencies’.

Lexical Exceptions in Stress Systems: Arguments from Early Language Acquisition and Adult Speech Perception

Some, but not all, languages with fixed stress exhibit lexical exceptions to their stress rule. Under the assumption that lexical exceptions can occur in a language only if its native speakers can perceive stress contrasts, I argue that the presence of these exceptions depends on the age at which infants discover the stress rule of their language. If the stress regularity is easy to infer from the surface speech stream, then it will be acquired very early, and stress will not be encoded in the phonological representation of words in the mental lexicon; as a consequence, stress contrasts are not well perceived by adult speakers and lexical exceptions are excluded. If, by contrast, the regularity is difficult to infer, then it will be acquired relatively late, after the format of the phonological encoding of words has been fixed. That is, stress will be redundantly encoded in the mental lexicon, and lexical exceptions can thus be perceived and stored by adult speakers. A typological survey concerning the occurrence of exceptions in languages with fixed stress supports this proposal. A comparison with a metrical approach to exceptional stress is made, leading to a proposal about the division of labor between psycholinguistics and theoretical phonology.

Models of phonology in the education of speech‐language pathologists

We discuss developments in theoretical phonology and, in particular, at the divide between theories aiming to be adequate accounts of the data, as opposed to those claiming psycholinguistic validity. It would seem that the latter might have greater utility for thye speech‐language pathologist. However, we need to know the dominant models of clinical phonology, in both clinical education and practise, before we can promote other theoretical approaches. This article describes preliminary results from a questionnaire designed to discover what models of phonology are taught in institutions training speech‐language pathologists in the United States. Results support anecdotal evidence that only a limited number of approaches (phonemic, distinctive features, and processes) are taught in many instances. They also demonstrate that some correspondents were unable to distinguish aspects of theoretical phonology from similar sounding (but radically different) models of intervention. This ties in with the results showing that some instructors of phonology courses have little or no background in the subject.

Introduction

Introduction Heather Goad and Yvan Rose 1. Introduction A significant portion of research conducted on the acquisition of phonology has traditionally focussed on segmental development, on the acquisition of contrasts, and on processes commonly affecting target sounds. While early generative research was primarily concerned with first language (L1) learners (Smith 1973; Ingram 1974), an important body of work was devoted to second language (L2) learners (Eckman 1977; Flege 1980) and to individuals exhibiting delayed or disordered phonological development as well (e.g., Grunwell 1975; Ingram 1976). In the 1970s and early 1980s, the segmental focus of work in acquisition was largely due to influence from theoretical research in generative phonology at the time, which accorded no formal status to the syllable or to hierachical representations more generally (Chomsky and Halle 1968). With the onset of nonlinear phonology (Goldsmith 1976; Kahn 1976) and subsequent development of highly articulated models of feature organization (Sagey 1986), the acquisition research on segment structure shifted to investigating the ways that feature organization could predict paths in the emergence of contrasts (Rice 1996; Brown and Matthews 1997) and appropriately constrain the rule components of developing grammars (Hancin-Bhatt 1994; Levelt 1994; Dinnsen 1998). The new focus on highly structured representations in theoretical phonology led to the development of nonlinear approaches to prosodic representation (Selkirk 1980; Clements and Keyser 1983). With this, some attention was turned to the acquisition of syllable structure, stress, and prosodic constraints on word shape in [End Page 139] both first (Spencer 1986; Fikkert 1994) and second language acquisition (Broselow 1984; Archibald 1993). Researchers also began to systematically investigate the role that prosodic factors play in segmental acquisition (e.g., Macken 1992). While nonlinear phonology standardly assumes that both segments and prosodic units are highly articulated, they constitute independent modules of the grammar. These modules can, of course, interact, but the architecture of the model predicts their behaviour to be largely autonomous. In the more recently developed Optimality Theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993), the opposite view is taken as a starting point. In OT, where the principal source of explanation is a set of universal, rankable constraints, a single constraint can contain both segmental and prosodic information, and constraints which express segmental generalizations can be inter-ranked with those that express prosodic generalizations. In short, segmental-prosodic interaction is expected to be the norm. The interactive approach that defines OT is supported by work on positional effects in end-state grammars, namely, that the realization of segmental contrasts is often dependent on position in the string: a greater range of contrasts is observed in those positions that are strong, while loss or lack of contrast is observed in contexts that are weak. Strong-weak asymmetries are conventionally tied to structural considerations, that is, to prosodic licensing (Itô 1986; Goldsmith 1990; Harris 1997; in OT, see, e.g., Zoll 1998). Recently, however, other sources of explanation have been sought; strong-weak asymmetries have been attributed to the relative strength of perceptual cues (e.g., Steriade 1999; Côté 2000) or to psycholinguistic considerations (e.g., Beckman 1997). Regardless of the source of explanation for position-sensitive effects, an appeal to markedness enters into most accounts of the asymmetries observed. Specifically, faithfulness to segmental contrast is less likely to be respected in weak positions where markedness considerations take priority. Turning to acquisition, there is widespread recognition that in first language development, children's early productions are unmarked (Jakobson 1968; Demuth 1995; Gnanadesikan in press). In second language acquisition, where most research has focussed on the acquisition of aspects of grammar where the L1 is a subset of the L2, markedness has been shown to play an important role in shaping interlanguage (IL) outputs as well (Eckman 1977; Broselow, Chen, and Wang 1998). These two factors, the focus on position-sensitive effects and on the role of markedness in shaping grammars, serve to contextualize the theme of the current issue: segmental-prosodic interaction in phonological acquisition. Our goal has been to include articles that reflect different points of view on the formalization of this interaction. While some contributions discuss the effects of prosodic factors on learners' development, others appeal to alternative sources of explanation for...

The interaction of F0 and vowel quality in tonal and nontonal languages

The issue investigated in the present study was the interaction between F0 and vowel formants in natural speech. F0 and vowel formants are normally assumed to be independent of each other. However, there are systematic correlations between tone (F0) and vowel height in some tonal languages, including Fuzhou and Mandarin. This study examined changes in the first three vowel formants that accompany tonal changes in the speech of native speakers of Fuzhou and Mandarin. Data from English speakers with manipulated pitch contours were used for comparison. Preliminary results indicate that in Fuzhou the tonal changes seem to be accompanied by changes in the formants, with one vowel phoneme being replaced by another. By contrast, in Mandarin the tonal changes seem to be accompanied only by allophonic changes in the vowels. In both tonal languages the change in vowel quality accompanying tonal changes is greater than that accompanying pitch changes in English. Implications of the complete results for theoretical phonology will also be discussed. [Work supported by NIDCD Grant Nos. R01 DC00219 and T32 DC00036.]

Crosscurrents in Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theories

1. Preface 2. I. Overview 3. Second language acquisition: litmus test for linguistic theory? (by Huebner, Thom) 4. Recent trends in syntactic theory (by Sells, Peter) 5. Typology/universals and second language acquisition (by Greenberg, Joseph H.) 6. II. From Theories to Hypothesis Testing 7. Prosodic phonology: second language acquisition data as evidence in theoretical phonology (by Vogel, Irene) 8. Natural morphology: the organization of paradigms and language acquisition (by Bybee, Joan L.) 9. Typological text analysis: tense and aspects in creoles and second languages (by Myhill, John) 10. Relational grammar: L2 learning and the components of L1 knowledge (by Rosen, Carol) 11. Government-binding: parameter-setting in second language acquisition and implications for theoretical linguistics (by Klein, Wolfgang) 12. Functionalist linguistics: discourse structure and language processing in second language acquisition (by Cooreman, Ann) 13. Variation theory: implicational scaling and critical age limits in models of linguistic variation, acquisition and change (by Rickford, John R.) 14. III. From Data to Model Building 15. Perception and production: the relevance of phonetic input to L2 phonological learning (by Flege, James Emil) 16. The teaching of intonation: classroom experiences to theoretical models (by Cessaris, Ann C.) 17. Developmental sequences: the emergence of aspect marking in second language acquisition (by Andersen, Roger W.) 18. Cross-generational bilingualism: theoretical implications of language attrition (by Silva-Corvalan, Carmen) 19. Modality and second language learning: a challenge for linguistic theory (by Dittmar, Norbert) 20. Narrative and description: temporal reference in second language acquisition (by Stutterheim, Christiane von) 21. Cross-linguistic comparisons: organizational principles in learner languages (by Perdue, Clive) 22. IV. Conclusions 23. Currents between second language acquisition and linguistic theory (by Ferguson, Charles A.)

Evidence of an argot for Amharic and theoretical phonology

Evidence of an argot for Amharic and theoretical phonology