Trukese is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by about 10,000 inhabitants of the islands of the Truk lagoon and by a few thousands more in the Hall Islands to the north and in the Mortlock Islands to the south. This paper is the first attempt (as far as I know) to apply the comparative method to Trukese. A large number of reconstructions based on the comparison of some eleven different Malayo-Polynesian languages are available. This paper attempts to deal with the results obtained by applying these reconstructions to Trukese. This procedure should give us some insight into the history of the Trukese vowels.

The analysis of tone phonemes, or tonemes, like that of segmental phonemes, necessarily involves considerations of phonetic similarity—necessarily, because there is no other basis upon which tones occurring in noncontrastive distribution can be phonemically identified with one another. But how is ‘phonetic similarity’ to be understood in the case of tones? Not, certainly, in the sense in which it is understood in the case of segmental phones, where it denotes some objective similarity in the articulatory or acoustic characteristics of the phones themselves. To be sure, even in this case phonetic similarity is a rather elastic criterion; but at least it can be shown, for example, that two vocalic phones have a common tongue position, or two consonantal phones certain common distinctive features. No such objective similarity is demonstrable in the case of tones—at least, of level tones; for, since it is relative rather than absolute pitch that is involved in tonemic systems, a given toneme may occur at virtually any pitch of which the voice is capable. Variants of a man's high tonemes may be acoustically similar to those of a woman's low tonemes; and in the speech of a single speaker a given level of pitch in two utterances or even within one utterance may represent variants of several different tonemes. The possibilities of phonemic overlapping of level tonemes are virtually unlimited.

In discussions of Proto-Indo-European phonology few attempts have been made to state the distribution of phonemes in the proto-language. Handbooks give lists of the phonemes, with examples of their occurrences; this is the presentation that we find in both Brugmann's and Hirt's descriptions of PIE phonology. From such lists, especially from those given by Brugmann, students can draw conclusions about the distribution of PIE phonemes; the conclusions of course are valid only to the extent that the compiler was aware of the need for a comprehensive list. But accurate descriptions of the distribution of PIE phonemes are lacking.

The Albanian language constitutes a distinct branch in the Satem division of the Indo-European languages. It is the direct descendant of the ancient Illyrian of Roman times, together with some Thracian influences. Since Albania is an isolated and mountainous region, and there has been no attempt at standardizing a literary language until very recent years, the number of local dialects, varying in grammar and syntax, in vocabulary, and in phonetic structure, is enormous. At the present time, two principal dialectal divisions exist, Geg or Northern, and Tosk or Southern, which are more or less mutually intelligible. The inhabitants of Albania number one million, and at least another million speakers of the language live in the surrounding countries or across the seas.

The present study is an attempt to describe, in terms of form, the position of the actor expression in the colloquial Spanish of present-day Mexico. Regional, social, and chronological differences are disregarded, provided the material observed belongs, in the writers' opinion, to the colloquial form of speech.

Procedure. The material was collected during a stay in Mexico, from June 1948 to February 1949.1 We gathered literary examples from nine colloquial texts, representing different dialects and different social strata. This literary material we checked and enlarged with the help of informants, again from different regions and different strata. The bulk of the examples on which the investigation is based were secured from the informants, rather than from the texts: the language of even colloquial literature is often too artificial or too folksy to represent normal usage.

This study investigates whether alternation learning is facilitated by a matching phonotactic generalization. In a series of artificial grammar learning experiments, English learners were trained on artificial languages evincing categorical vowel harmony alternations across morpheme boundaries. These languages differed in the degree of harmony within stems (disharmonic, semi-harmonic, and harmonic), and thus the degree of phonotactic support for the alternation. Results indicate that alternation learning was best when supported by matching stem phonotactics (harmonic language; experiment 1). Learners, however, were reluctant to extend a learned phonotactic constraint to novel unseen alternations (experiments 2 and 3). Taken together, the results are consistent with the hypothesis that alternation learning is facilitated by a matching static phonotactic generalization, but that learners are conservative in positing alternations in the absence of overt evidence for them.

The following description of Old English weak-verb morphophonemics is predicated on a constituent-structure analysis which differs in some respects from that implied in traditional grammars of Old English—particularly in the treatment of the gemination of final stem-consonants of verbs of the first class and the -i- element of verbs of the second class. A system of morphonemes, represented as a matrix of distinctive features, is posited for Old English, and the rules are cast in terms of these features. The resulting description emphasizes the underlying structural regularities of the weak-verb system, and is suggestive of relationships between ordered synchronic rules and linguistic change.

This paper falls into a shorter general part and a longer special part. Part 1 is concerned with the various solutions which a speech community may seek in the event of a threatening collision of two homonyms or near-homonyms ; a careful distinction is drawn, in almost every category, between strictly lexical and lexico-grammatical homophony. Four characteristic patterns are established: (a) The speakers, after some wavering, in the end accept both partners, because of contextual disambiguation or because the words at issue pertain to different social dialects (or registers)—or else because one is common, and the other relatively rare, e.g. technical, (b) The stronger word dislodges the weaker word, eliminating it altogether or driving it into a corner, sometimes only temporarily; strength, in this context, is measurable by sheer frequency, or by smoothness of structural integration, or by ready availability vs. total absence of suitable substitute items, (c) The two words merge, producing a third word, usually of extended semantic ambit. (d) The partners are gradually differentiated in meaning and, above all, in form, through complicated and less than obvious analogical processes—with the further dichotomy of either (α) a single partner or (β) both partners undergoing such polarizing changes. Throughout Part 1, examples are adduced from a mixed bag of European languages.

The importance of the morphophoneme as a structural unit has not been fully recognized. Post-Bloomfieldians explicitly rejected this unit and methods of description making use of it. This paper contends that morphophonemes are indeed required for the most efficient description of morpheme alternants. It is further argued that morphophonemes are real phonological units and not simply abstractions fictions. These points are illustrated by a problem in Tera, a Chadic language of northern Nigeria. In order to account for word-final vowel alternations, some /i/'s must be interpreted as the morphophoneme |ə|, others as |i|. Surprisingly, allophones of preceding consonants are variably determined by these underlying morphophonemes.

This article describes a tool that can be used by blind and visually impaired students in phonetics and phonology classrooms: a tactile International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) magnet-board system. This tool consists of IPA magnets and phonological rule symbols that are printed and embossed, so as to be readable by both sighted and visually impaired individuals. A user of the tool can lay out phonetic and phonological data on the magnet board for communicative, organizational, or problem-solving purposes. Since the magnet board can be read both visually and tactually, it can serve as a collaborative space that can be used by both sighted and visually impaired members of the classroom. Potential uses include group work in class and as an augmentation to chalkboard problem-solving demonstrations. The tool can complement already extant options for blind and visually impaired students and facilitate collaboration between sighted and visually impaired students. Here, we describe the tool, exemplify some potential uses, and offer suggestions for further improvement.

It is well-known that Grassmann's law is restricted in its application in Greek vis-à-vis Sanskrit. In Greek, the rule applies generally to deaspirate an initial underlying aspirated stop in a reduplicating syllable: tithēmi ‘I place’ < *thithēmi, pépheuga ‘I have fled’ < *phé-pheuga, kékhutai ‘it has poured forth’ < *khé-khutai, etc; but within a root it applies only to an initial dental and to /h/ from an underlying /s/: tréphō ‘I nourish’ < *thréphō (cf. thrépsō ‘I shall nourish’), trikhós ‘hair, gen. sg.’ < *thrikhós (cf. thríks ‘hair, nom. sg.’), ékhō ‘I hold’ < *hékhō < *sékhō (cf. héksō ‘I shall hold’, éskhon ‘I held‘), etc. There are no cases in Greek in which a root-initial labial or velar voiceless unaspirated stop alternates with the corresponding aspirated stop.

Germanic verbs of the 3rd weak class form presents characterized by an alternation between predesinential ∗ai (e.g. Go. 3sg. habaiþ) and ∗a (e.g. 1pl. habam). These verbs are usually compared with the ‘ē-verbs’ of Italic and Balto-Slavic, but no IE present built on the stative suffix ∗-ē- will account phonologically for the form of the suffix in Germanic. Instead, it can be shown that the characteristic Germanic paradigm results from the ‘activization’ of an older middle paradigm in which a 3sg. in ∗-ai (< IE ∗-oi; cf. Skt. duhé ‘milks‘) was further suffixed by the productive active ending ∗-þi (< IE ∗-ti).

Evidence has been advanced recently in favor of incorporating a generalized version of derivational history (or global rules) into phonological theory. The innovation of this theoretical device constitutes a significant departure from the standard theory of phonology as articulated by Chomsky & Halle 1968, and vastly increases the range of possible formal grammatical relationships. However, any theory that incorporates a generalized version of derivational history characterizes a wider range of relationships than need be ascribed to natural language. All empirically defensible cases of derivational history are characteristically restricted to deletion phenomena. The restricted nature of this evidence permits—indeed, demands—a highly constrained version of derivational history. Thus the NULL SEGMENT HYPOTHESIS is here proposed as a possible and appropriate constraint. This hypothesis requires the selection of one derivational marker, i.e. the ‘null segment’, which is naturally assigned to deletion output strings and is carried through the derivation to be recovered in a similarly constrained fashion at a subsequent point in the derivation. The null segment hypothesis and its related constraints thus narrowly define the set of all and only those processes in the necessary empirically defensible derivational history relationship. The role of this hypothesis also has implications for representing certain information in lexical items.