In this paper we will discuss several cases of the phonology of loan words. We will show that loan words are adapted phonologically to meet certain constraints on possible words or morphemes imposed on them by the borrowing language. Most significantly, such constraints are defined on the level of lexical representation. To our knowledge so-called “surface phonetic constraints” (henceforth SPC’s) play no role in the phonology of loan words, nor indeed in any other part of phonology. Our examples show that deep phonotactic constraints, constraints not necessarily reflected on the surface, are the drums to which loan words must march. This is not to say that all aspects of loan word phonological behaviour are now understood. Many mysterious facts still remain unexplained. We do claim that substantial aspects of this phenomenon may be understood by assuming that the systematic phonemic level of generative phonology is the level on which the constraints controlling loan word phonological behaviour are defined.

Montagnais, an Algonquian language spoken in Quebec, exists in a number of different dialects. The main divisions are on a geographic basis, with western, eastern, and southern Montagnais, and within each of these varieties sub-dialects centered on specific communities like Pointe Bleu, Betsiamites, or Natashquan. In addition, within each community there may be other dialectal distinctions based on age, socio-economic factors, or elements as specialized as the location of traditional family hunting grounds, grounds in which one need no longer hunt to still have them considered family territory. One such community is the reserve town of Betsiamites, also known as Bersimis. The most notable dialectal division there is one based on age : there is a dialect of people over 60; one of people between 40 and 60; and one of those under 40. In addition, there seems to be a conservative/innovative split that cuts across the age-based dialect split, which itself is based on innovations in the speech of younger speakers, and which does not seem to be correlated with any social or political distinction, but only with phonological change and retention in relation to earlier forms of Montagnais and Proto-Algonquian itself. In the innovative dialect, sibilant-stop clusters consist uniformly of [š] plus a stop; or, in the case of young innovative speakers, a development therefrom. In the conservative dialect, sibilant-stop clusters are found in complementary neutralization: before [t] there occurs only [s]; before [p] and [k] there occurs only [š], no matter what was the source of the first or second element of the cluster in Proto-Algonquian (PA).

Dans cet article nous présentons une nouvelle théorie pour rendre compte du maintien du e [ə] final en ancien français dans l’évolution historique des mots suivants:

Nous allons présenter d’abord les descriptions traditionnelles de ces évolutions, en précisant leurs limites, puis la solution de Fouché (1966), et enfin dans une troisième partie, notre propre solution.

Although variants of the form [fri] and [bof] for standard [θri] ‘three’ and [boθ] ‘both’ are well attested in dialects as divergent as Cockney (Sivertsen 1960) and Black English Vernacular (Wolfram and Fasold 1974), there has been no attempt, to my knowledge, to treat these “substitutions” (a term with which they are frequently dismissed) as anything but isolated phenomena. Wyld (1936) and Dobson (1957), who are among the most respected authorities on English phonology, both specifically identify the [θ]/[f] alternation as an “isolative change.

In Natural Generative Phonology (NGP), the only phonological rules are those which describe alternations that take place in environments that can be specified in purely phonetic terms. As indicated by Hooper, these “‘phonetic terms’ refer to phonological features (that have intrinsic phonetic content) and phonological boundaries (that have a necessary and consistent phonetic manifestation)” (1976:14). Any rule which changes phonological features in an environment described in morphosyntactic or lexical terms is not phonological but morphophonemic. Since by definition a phonological rule cannot contain non-phonetic information, this entails, among other things, the exclusion of any boundary that is not determined by phonetic means. In other words, the syllable ($) and the pause (| |) are the only boundaries which can appear in a phonological rule in NGP. The word boundary (# and ##) and the morpheme boundary (+), which are determined by syntactic and semantic means, can only appear in a morphophonemic rule.

Over the past few years, research in language acquisition has shifted away from the view that linguistic structures are learned independently of semantic concepts and grammatical functions and toward a more cognitively based perspective (cf. Slobin 1973 ; Clark and Clark 1977). In the latter approach, cognitive principles are assumed to govern the acquisition of linguistic structures, and the earlier autonomous view of language acquisition is replaced by a more catholic attitude encompassing both formal and psychological aspects of language. This perspective is adopted for the analyses presented below.

The following four sentences illustrate the phenomenon which, for convenience, we shall call Missing NP’s in Japanese:

The variation in the possible referents for Δ must be accounted for, whether Δ arises by a rule deleting NP’s, or is present in deep structure and interpreted by a rule of coreference assignment.

Drawing on evidence found in the Survey of English Dialects (SED), in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Grammar (1905) and elsewhere, J. Lawrence Mitchell (1979) suggests that the development of Middle English [x] into [θ], [f], [s] and ø in such terms as trough, plough and sigh is the result of a systematic phonological process which he terms ‘sliding.’ This sliding, he maintains, takes place along a consonantal strength scale which determines the order of change as [x] → [θ] → [f] → [s]. The purpose of the present paper is to bring forward some evidence for. [f] → [θ], which runs counter to his theory.

In the Merriam-Webster file of transcriptions, which now numbers over 272,000 slips, attention was first drawn to the substitution of [θ] for [f] in 1955 by a citation for aphis consistently pronounced [eθis] by a resident of western Massachusetts. We also have the testimony of a college-educated native English speaker from eastern New England (Waltham, Mass.) that he grew up saying Philadel[θ]ia and epita[θ]. He reports, in addition, that this pronunciation of the Pennsylvania city was used by a college friend from northeastern New England, a usage which was the butt of remarks by other classmates.

All treatments of so-called to-contraction in English (Lakoff (1970), Bresnan (1971), Lightfoot (1976)) attempt to deal with this phenomenon entirely in terms of contiguity. The purpose of this squib is to point out that the major constraint on this phenomenon is rather one of subject coreference, and furthermore that this coreference condition is identical to that for a universal rule which I have called ‘equi-subject clause union’ (Frantz 1976).

To illustrate, I will reconsider typical examples cited in discussions of this phenomenon, pointing out the relevance of coreference.

Perlmutter posits a universally-applicable Clause Union (CU) rule as follows:

1. (a) If the downstairs clause is intransitive, downstairs 1 becomes upstairs 2.

2. (b) If it is transitive, downstairs 2 becomes upstairs 2, and downstairs 1 becomes upstairs 3.

3. (c) Deviations will be the result of (i) PSV or (ii) DAT MVT.

Vowel nasalization and the subsequent development of these nasalized vowels constitute one of the most intensively studied areas in French historical phonology. Despite this attention, however, the set of problems associated with these phenomena is not exhausted. I will argue here, for example, that nasalization in French provides evidence for the crucial role of allophonic information (redundant phonetic detail) in initiating and conditioning phonological regularities, thus violating the local determinacy constraint (Chomsky 1964) placed on the phonemic level of representation. The same evidence also illustrates an infrequent type of historical change, and reinforces the impression that much fertile ground remains to be tilled in this particular field.

Berlin and Kay (1969) present strong evidence that “all languages share a universal system of basic colour categorization” and that “the basic color-term inventories of most languages expand through time by lexicalizing these categories in a highly constrained, universal order” (Kay and McDaniel 1978:610). The validity of these conclusions has also been demonstrated by Collier et al. (1976) and by Kay and McDaniel (1978). The evolutionary process identified by Berlin and Kay can be represented schematically as follows:

where the arrow may be read ‘is encoded before’ (Kay and McDaniel 1978: 615). In other words, languages proceed through a series of stages in the development of their basic colour-term lexicon, with the most simplistic system containing only terms for white (light) and black (dark). Any expansion of this fundamental system will first result in the addition of a term for red and then in the addition of a term for green or yellow. If further expansion takes place, “yellow or green, whichever did not emerge at the previous stage, now emerges” (Berlin and Kay 1969:18), followed by terms for blue and brown. When a system develops beyond Stage VI, “there is a rapid expansion to the full roster of eleven basic color categories,” although no particular order of appearance among terms for purple, pink, orange, or gray has been ascertained (Berlin and Kay 1969:21-22).

Králík (1977) examined four Czech texts of 7000 words each, in which he marked every occurrence of the word meaning and (and separately, three other words). The interval between two successive occurrences of the marked word is called a gap, and the number of words in that gap is the gap length. When the quantity of gaps of each length was recorded, it was found that there were many more short gaps than long ones. Králík proposed an exponential decay model of this distribution of gap lengths: For N gaps in a text of T words, the proportion of those gaps that are of length x should tend to be:

f(x) = a exp (— ax) where a = N/T

That is, as the gap length increases, the number of such gaps decreases in a smooth, downwardly convex, “swooping” curve.