Browse

This book offers a comprehensive description of the prosody of nine Romance languages (Catalan, French, Friulian, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish) which takes into account internal dialectal variation. The prosodic analysis of all nine languages has been couched in a common framework, the Autosegmental Metrical framework of intonational phonology and the ToBI transcription system, and has been carried out by groups of well-known experts on the prosody of these languages. One of the two noteworthy aspects of the book is the common methodology used in each of the chapters, which was based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire. The elicited DCT data allow for an analysis of how intonation patterns work together with other grammatical means (syntactic constructions, discourse particles) in the linguistic marking of a varied set of sentence-types and pragmatic meanings across Romance languages. The second important aspect of the book is the fact that the ToBI prosodic systems and annotations proposed for each language are based both on a phonological analysis of the target language and on the shared goal of using ToBI analyses that are comparable across Romance languages.

Although there is a rich history of research in linguistic typology, phonology has received relatively little attention in this literature compared to morphology and syntax. This book is the first linguistic typology book devoted to the field of phonology. Drawing on a combination of existing typologies and results of a survey of various phonological patterns in the 100-language WALS (World Atlas of Language Structures) sample, the book examines the cross-linguistic distribution of major phonological phenomena including phoneme inventories, syllable structure, segmental alternations, stress, tone, intonation, and prosodic morphology. Quantitative data from corpora of individual languages are also presented and compared with cross-linguistic patterns in order to assess the relationship between inter- and intralanguage frequency. These data are used to explore correlations between different (sometimes superficially unrelated) phonological properties to gain insight into the driving forces behind these phenomena. The book provides an overview of synchronic and diachronic explanations for the observed patterns and discussion of how formal phonological theory has attempted to model the typological data.

Bantu languages have played and continue to play an important role as a source of data illustrating core phonological processes—vowel harmony, nasal place assimilation, postnasal laryngeal alternations, tonal phenomena such as high tone spread and the OCP, prosodic morphology, and the phonology–syntax interface. Chichewa, in particular, has been a key language in the development of theoretical approaches to these phonological phenomena. This book provides thorough descriptive coverage, presented in a clear, atheoretical manner, of the full range of phonological phenomena of Chichewa. Less well-studied topics—such as positional asymmetries in the distribution of segments, the phonetics of tone, and intonation—are also included. The book surveys, where relevant, important recent theoretical approaches to phonological problems—such as vowel harmony, the phonology–syntax interface, focus prosody, and reduplication—where Chichewa data is routinely referred to in the theoretical literature. The book will therefore serve as a resource for phonologists—at all levels and working in different theoretical frameworks—who are interested in the processes discussed. Because many of the phonological processes in Chichewa are conditioned by particular morphological or syntactic contexts, the book should also be of interest to linguists working on the interfaces. As there are almost no other monographs on the phonology of Bantu languages available, this book serves as an excellent introduction to core issues in the phonology of Bantu languages.

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 provides a comprehensive overview of Swedish phonology. There are two chapters on respectively vowels and consonants, describing the alternations and distributions of allophones and providing new, motivated phonemic charts. The rules and processes that are primarily segmental in nature are collected in one chapter, which includes both fully productive processes, and partly petrified ones. Among the most interesting segmental processes are the sandhi process of retroflexion, where interaction of several conditioning factors (quantity, morphology, phonation) accounts for the distribution, and the rule of d-continuization whereby a /d/ is realized as [r] in words that lack phonological stress. Most previous interest in Swedish phonology concerns the prosodic level and several chapters are devoted to an account for the interaction of stress, tone, prosodic structure and morphological structure. The minimal prosodic word is shown to be the domain of syllabification, of culminativity by stress, and of the assignment of a lexical tone from suffix to primary stress. Unlike English, Swedish only admits one stress per minimal prosodic word. Moreover, Swedish stress information is largely specified in morphemes (as stressed, or as subcategorizing for a stress). Together with a phonological stress rule, these factors greatly constrain word formation in Swedish, as well as account for the rather spectacular process of nickname formation. The argument for this organization of things is extensively laid out in two chapters focussing on the stress and accent distribution, respectively. Another chapter lays out the quantity system of Swedish, where stressed syllables must be heavy, but by virtue of containing either a long vowel or a long consonant. There is a chapter on the orthographic representation and comments on orthography are also given in the chapters on vowels and consonants. The book aims at providing new analyses where motivated, but at the same time endeavours not to be too theory dependent in presentation.

The Phonology of Welsh is an exploration of the phonology of modern Welsh. Starting with an overview of the phonetics and segment inventories of Welsh, the book then examines the phonological structures of the language, including syllables, feet, phonotactics and stress. Having established the basic phonetic inventories and phonological structures of the language, the book moves on to the analysis of phonological alternations such as ‘vowel mutation’ and assimilation, analyzed within the framework of Optimality Theory. The analysis then considers the importance of the phonological foot, accounting for a number of foot-based phenomena such as sonority sequencing resolutions, the behaviour of /h/, and antepenultimate deletion – the variable deletion of the initial syllable of certain trisyllabic words. The book also examines initial consonant mutation, the variation in initial consonants of wordforms characteristic of the Celtic languages. Finally, the last chapter points out directions for further research in Welsh phonology. Taken as a whole, the book aims to present a theoretically coherent account of the sound patterns of modern Welsh as a whole, thus filling a gap in the available literature on the language.

The research in this volume addresses several recurring topics in Romance Phonetics and Phonology with a special focus on the segment, syllable, word, and phrase levels of analysis. The original research presented in this volume ranges from the low-level mechanical processes involved in speech production and perception to high-level representation and computation. The interaction between these two dimensions of speech and their effects on first- and second-language acquisition are methodically treated in later chapters. Individual chapters address rhotics in various languages (Spanish, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese), both taps and trills, singleton and geminate; vowel nasalization and associated changes; sibilants and fricatives, the ways in which vowels are affected by their position; there are explorations of diphthongs and consonant clusters in Romanian; variant consonant production in three Catalan dialects; voice quality discrimination in Italian by native speakers of Spanish; mutual language perception by French and Spanish native speakers of each other’s language; poetry recitation (vis-à-vis rhotics in particular); French prosodic structure; glide modifications and pre-voicing in onsets in Spanish and Catalan; vowel reduction in Galician; and detailed investigations of bilinguals’ language acquisition. A number of experimental methods are employed to address the topics under study including both acoustic and articulatory data; electropalatography (EPG), ultrasound, electromagnetic articulography (EMA).

This book is a study of the tone and accent of Oklahoma Cherokee, which has six possible pitch patterns occurring on a syllable: low, high, low–high, high–low, lowfall, and superhigh. This study attempts to provide a comprehensive description and analyses of these patterns: their distribution, their source, the principles which determine their positions, and the nature of tonal alternations. The tonal and accentual system of Oklahoma Cherokee manifests some typologically outstanding features, such as glottal stop as the historical source for both high and lowfall tones, the coexistence of tonal and accentual systems, the existence of multiple accentual systems, and the morphosyntactic use of accents. Studies on tones in general have focused mainly on analytical languages or languages with little morphology, but Cherokee is unique in that it is polysynthetic at the same time as tonal. Emergence of tones in Oklahoma Cherokee is recent and its source is easily traceable, but it has already developed a complex tonal alignment and tonal phonology. Description of the tone and accent of Oklahoma Cherokee will contribute to the deeper understanding of not only the sound system of Cherokee, but also of the historical study of Iroquoian in general, and to the typological study of tonal and accentual systems more generally.