In OE, long consonants are fully established in one and only one position: between a fully stressed or a half-stressed short vowel (or diphthong) and a following unstressed vowel, as in clyppan, settan, reccan, ebba, middel, hycgan, frogga, fremman, spinnan, spillan, steorra, siþþan, missan, hliehhan (hlæhhan), and (after a half-stressed short vowel) in bliccettan ‘glitter’, oretta ‘challenger’, faranne (inf.), wēstenne ‘wilderness’.

[The Hittite relative kuiš is like the early Italic relative in that (1) the relative clause tends to stand before the main clause, (2) the relative itself is usually postpositive, (3) a demonstrative frequently stands within the relative clause, and (4) the relative is often doubled (kuiš kuiš, quis quis), This detailed correspondence proves that the relative (i.e. connective) value of the stem was Indo-European and also Indo-Hittite. Confirmation of the conclusion is furnished by the connective force of *qe, which is certainly akin. Both in IE and in IH the relative os was probably used after definite antecedents, while *qis was a general relative.]

A widespread assumption in the language contact literature is that affixes are never borrowed directly, but only indirectly, that is, as part of complex loanwords. From such complex loanwords, affixes may eventually spread to native stems, creating hybrid formations, in a process of language-internal analogical extension. Direct borrowing is the extraction of an affix based on knowledge of the donor language, without the mediation of complex loanwords within the recipient language. This article suggests that direct borrowing can also be the only or primary process leading to productive loan affixes. Criteria are provided to assess instances of direct and indirect borrowing on the basis of the distribution of borrowed affixes across complex loanwords and hybrid formations. These are applied to corpora of various languages. A scale of directness of affix borrowing is proposed, based on the extent to which speakers of the recipient language rely (i) on their knowledge of the donor language (direct borrowing) and (ii) on complex loanwords within their native language (indirect borrowing).

As the Dyirbal language of Australia nears extinction, its diminishing social function is accompanied by reduction within the linguistic system. If we place semi-speakers on a continuum according to the degree to which their language has been simplified, it is possible to trace changes in the grammar of the dying language. Focusing on morphological and syntactic ergativity demonstrates that decay in terminal Dyirbal involves systematic variation along the continuum. Reduction occurs on various levels, affecting syntactic operations and morphology. However, the data suggest that important formal and functional differences exist between dying Dyirbal and a typical pidgin.

This study investigates a contrast in tonal alignment that involves falling contours in Dinka. This contrast calls into question the assumption that tonal alignment cannot distinguish contour tones of the same shape within the syllable domain (e.g. Odden 1995). A qualitative description and a small-scale perception study are followed by a detailed production study. The results indicate that the main correlate of the contrast is indeed tonal alignment: the early-aligned fall sets in during the onset or early in the vowel; the late-aligned fall sets in well into the vowel. The production study also suggests that it is unlikely for more than two patterns of alignment in contour tones of the same shape to be accurately produced and perceived, given various phonetic limitations. The contrast is represented phonologically using a binary feature. This representation is adequate in an explanatory sense, in that the category boundary is in line with the quantal threshold hypothesized in House 1990. The results also corroborate the hypothesis of three-level vowel length in Dinka.

Preliminary estimates of language divergence and word retention have been obtained by means of a log log transform from data consisting of the determinations of cognations in the lexicostatistical lists of Austronesian languages. Corrections have been obtained to the preliminary estimates by a maximum likelihood estimation method which assigns appropriate scores to represent the weight of evidence contributed by each determination of cognation.

Old Spanish clitics or weak pronominals differ from modern Romance clitics in their syntactic properties. They are NP's or PP's, share the distribution of other phrasal complements, and undergo the same movement rules.

In Old Spanish (ca. 1200–1450), weak pronominals encliticize in Phonetic Form, after syntactic and stylistic rules have applied; i.e. they are phonological clitics.

In doubling constructions, including the resumptive pronoun strategy, the pronominal/clitic is the phrase in Argument-position; the doubling phrase is a topic or focus constituent, base-generated as a left or right adjunct of one of the maximal projections (i.e. VP, S, S′, S″).

We propose a new approach to metrics based on maxent grammars, which employ weighted constraints and assign well-formedness values to verse lines. Our approach provides an account of metricality and complexity that has a principled mathematical basis and integrates information from all aspects of scansion. Our approach also makes it possible to detect vacuous constraints through statistical evaluation.

We begin with a system built on earlier work that defines the set of possible constraints, following principles of stress matching, bracket matching, and contextual salience. The basic concepts of this system work well in describing our data corpora, taken from Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Milton’s Paradise Lost. However, one well-known type of constraint, based on the principle of the stress maximum (Halle & Keyser 1966 et seq.), emerges as vacuous; testing indicates that the work of such constraints is already done by simpler constraints independently needed in the grammar.

This article argues for a particular understanding of feature class behavior—the recurrent patterning together of certain phonological features, such as place of articulation and laryngeal features. The proposals build on the well-known work of feature geometry in assuming the importance of feature classes in phonology, but differ in that features of a class are targeted directly and individually by constraints (or rules), even when a feature class such as Place is mentioned. Further, constraints mentioning feature classes are gradiently violable. Evidence for this view of feature classes comes from two sources. First, assimilation involving feature classes is sometimes only partially successful; an adequate understanding of such cases requires the proposed view of feature classes. Second, there are broad categories of feature class generalization that require it, including dissimilatory effects usually handled by the obligatory contour principle. Overall, the proposals broaden the explanatory potential of the feature class idea due to feature geometry. At a more general level, the results here suggest that linguistic representations sometimes need to be reconsidered in the context of optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993), since they can effectively function as inviolable constraints and so hinder our understanding of the more subtle kind of phenomena revealed by analyses employing gradiently violable constraints.

This article explores the relationship between salience, stereotypes, and cooccurring language variables in the social perception of language. Following previous work, we argue that sociolinguistic perception is dependent upon the ability of listeners to map the linguistic cues contained in a speech signal to stereotypes. However, we contend that the understanding of which language features contribute to those stereotypes, and how they do so in the specific context of talk, has been limited because of the tendency to focus on preselected variables and to control for the context in which they occur. We advance an account of the role of stereotypes in the social perception of language by using a new tool for capturing, visualizing, and querying listeners' real-time reactions to voice samples. Our survey instrument collects reactions to two topically distinct guises from the same speaker (taken from the Scilly Voices corpus), both of which contained a similar number of regionally distinctive accent features. As our survey instrument includes a review function enabling listeners to provide information on why certain features were notable to them, we are able to interrogate listeners' ability to respond to unspecified linguistic features. Ultimately, this enables us to build a more nuanced account of the interaction between a range of linguistic features and their relationship to message content, and allows us to demonstrate that both do evaluative and perceptual work.

Our findings have important implications for those interested in understanding the situated meaning of linguistic features and, in particular, how researchers might continue to develop exemplar models of the ways in which social information is indexed to linguistic features. We argue that no experiment can be context-free and, as a result, researchers must consider ways of modeling the effects of co-present variants on a given exemplar, not just the social indices of specific exemplars themselves.

Linguistic and psychological concerns are seen to converge in the area of semantics in such a way as to suggest the value, for both disciplines, of ‘psychosemantic’ studies. This paper illustrates some of the possibilities by providing linguistic evidence for three kinds of memory, called surface, shallow, and deep. The evidence deals with the occurrence of temporal adverbs in English and with their intonation and order, as well as with the non-generic perfective. A classification of memory by psychologists into sensory, primary (short-term), and secondary (long-term) is discussed, and is seen to coincide only in part with—though not to conflict with—the linguistically motivated classification. The relevance of memory to the use of tenses is briefly explored, and it is observed that the tripartite classification of memory is mirrored in our concept of the future.

It is a familiar observation that phonological processes frequently fail to apply to geminates. A number of previous proposals attempted to account for these geminate inalterability effects in terms of a distinction between singly and multiply linked autosegments. Subsequent research, however, has observed that geminate inalterability is inviolable only in the domain of lenition processes. In this article, an account of this generalization is couched within a general optimality theoretic treatment of lenition, in which a scalar effort minimization constraint interacts with a set of lenition-blocking constraints. The geminate inalterability generalization follows from this effort-based approach to lenition, coupled with certain assumptions concerning the effort involved in geminates and their lenited counterparts.

Linguistic science is today in every sense of the word an international science. Few disciplines can lay better claim to this term than ours, in view of its universally and specifically human subject matter, as well as its bearing on the interrelationship and communication of nations. Even within our generation a vast expansion of linguistic study has taken place when compared with the preceding one. It is characteristic that around 1930 contributions to phoneme theory were being made by men as widely scattered as Trubetzkoy in Austria and Yuen Ren Chao in China. This was already a forward step over the much narrower field of Rask and Grimm, but we have seen a still more intense effort in the last two decades. From the occasional contributions of isolated professors we have in our own country proceeded to a concerted and eager program of linguistic research sponsored by a whole group of scholars working together in a vigorous and well-knit Linguistic Society.

The phonetic features of Arabic conventionally referred to by European and American scholars simply and collectively as emphasis, and identified by Arab grammarians as ?iṭbāq ‘spreading and raising of the tongue’, ?isti9lā? ‘elevation of the dorsum’, and tafxīm ‘thickness, heaviness’, have been attested in all known modern dialects of Arabic except Maltese. Early Arab grammarians recognized three pairs of contrasting emphatic and plain (i.e. nonemphatic) consonants— /.t d/, /./, and /.s s/, four other consonants as emphatic but unpaired— /.dqx γ/, and in certain environments emphatic variants of /1/ and /r/. That these were not the only consonants occurring with emphasis, at least in some environments, can be inferred from the proscriptions of such pronunciations in the Quranic orthoepy literature; but whether such consonants occurred in contrasting pairs, or only had emphatic positional or free variants, is less certain. In various modern dialects, restrictions on the distribution of emphasis and the number of contrasting emphatic and plain consonants differ considerably. All dialects have preserved the contrasting pairs listed above, or their reflexes. And as a result of sound change as well as borrowing and analogy, all dialects have acquired additional contrasting pairs; the following occur in all of the major dialects: /.t t/, /.d d/, /.s s/, /.z z/, /.l 1/, /.r r/, and, generally only in peninsular dialects, /./. Furthermore, most of these dialects exhibit additional contrasting pairs, especially in the labial series.

[In the actor-action-goal construction and in the character-substance (or modifier-noun) construction, Old English used taxemes of selection (inflected forms) to distinguish between actor (subject) and goal (object), and to indicate the direction of modification. The development of English has been away from the use of taxemes of selection with non-distinctive and connotative word-order, toward the use of taxemes of order operating practically without the aid of other devices. The patterns of the Modern English use seem to have been established by the middle of the 15th century.]

The student who turns to our many excellent handbooks for information on the stops and spirants of Proto-Germanic finds that they agree completely in some respects, but disagree just as completely in others. All of them assume for Proto-Germanic a set of voiceless spirants and a set of voiceless stops: the spirants /f þ h/ as in English fish, thin, horn, derived from PIE /p t k/ as in Latin piscis, tenuis, cornu; and the stops /p t k/ as in English lip, two, kin, derived from PIE /b d g/ as in Latin labium, duo, genus. All of them also assume that there were some further sounds derived from PIE /bh dh gh/ and, by Verner's Law, from /p t k/, and that these sounds were voiced; but there is no agreement whatever as to whether these sounds were stops, or spirants, or both.

In current transformational theory, the active–passive relation is not accounted for by the Passive transformation. Furthermore, transformational accounts of passive sentences run into serious problems with respect to the derivation of truncated passives. It is demonstrated here that the active–passive relation can be captured in the lexicon without a Passive transformation, and that such a solution does not involve the problems created by a transformational account. An interpretive rule for handling the synonymy of actives and passives—necessary whether or not passives are transformationally derived—is proposed. Lastly, it is shown how passives may be directly generated by the phrase-structure rules; this analysis is not susceptible to the criticisms given by Chomsky 1957 for a phrase-structure account of passives.

Our descriptions of the system of noun inflection in Proto-Indo-European have been modified little since the beginning of this century. At that time Schmidt, Jacobi, van Wijk, and others were discussing the case endings; Brugmann was examining the gender categories, primarily to propose that the feminine gender was secondary.

In certain Eastern Algonquian languages a nasal vowel developed from the long low vowel /a:/, regardless of consonantal context. A series of experiments showed that longer vowels (regardless of height) were perceived as more nasalized than shorter ones, but only when some nasalization was actually present. Further experiments showed no evidence of an increase in nasalization for long vowels in oral contexts. If some nasalization was nonetheless introduced (either randomly or by a general increase in nasalization) into these languages, the vowels most likely to be perceived as nasalized were the long ones. This perceptual process may have been responsible for this unusual historical development.

1. The problem. The objectives of diachronic linguistics have always been to reconstruct the particular steps by which a language changes, and also to hypothesize about processes of language change in general. Recent discussion of the latter problem has frequently involved five closely related proposals. First, language changes by means of a series of individual innovations. These innovations consist primarily in the addition of single rules to the grammar of the adult speaker. Second, these innovations usually occur at some point of break in a grammar; for example, ‘before the first morphophonemic rule involving immediate constituent structure of the utterance … before the phonological rules that eliminate boundary markers from the representation’. Third, these innovations are passed on to the next generation when the child imitates the adult. A child may internalize the adult's grammar; or, more probably, he will simplify it. This is because children have an ability, not shared by most adults, to construct by induction from the utterances to which they have been exposed, the simplest grammar capable of generating sentences. The simplification will give rise to a discontinuity in transmission from generation to generation. In the interests of preserving intelligibility, this discontinuity will be minimal. Fourth, whenever the discontinuity results in radical changes such as restructuring, a mutation occurs. Finally, these mutations, which affect the overall simplicity of the grammar, are rare.