The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the occurrence of epenthetic vowels and consonants can be attributed to certain properties of syllable structure and some universal principles of syllabification interacting with (phonotactic) constraints, some of which are universal, others language-specific. The analysis of epenthesis proposed here is an elaboration and refinement of earlier proposals by Singh (1980, 1981a, 1981b, 1981c) and Piggott (1981). We believe that this analysis provides an explanation of the phenomenon of epenthesis. The paper is organized in the following way. In Section 1, we identify the phenomenon of epenthesis and summarize the difficulties in capturing generalizations about it within a framework which treats phonological representations as linear sequences of elements. In Section 2, we outline our conception of syllable structure and examine some of the consequences and implications of our assumptions. Section 3 contains an elaboration of the principles of syllabification that underlie our account of epenthesis. In Section 4, we indicate what we think we have managed to explain and point out some of the significance of the explanation provided. Finally, in Section 5, we try to link our work to some long-held views about the relationship of rules to constraints.

Coincidences between languages are not always obvious on the plane of expression. Sometimes they arise on the plane of content and find their way onto that of expression quite deviously, so that one is scarcely aware that speakers of one language are making the same semantic distinction as speakers of another. An example is the rule of adjective position in Spanish and Italian which English lacks, and which is illustrated by such Spanish examples as

1. Tenía ricos ornamentos; Tenía ornamentos ricos: It had rich ornaments.

2. Le dio un dulce beso; Le dio un beso dulce: He gave her a sweet kiss.

3. Noté un barato perfume; Noté un perfume barato: I noticed a cheap perfume.

1. In the studies of Canadian English which have appeared up to date, emphasis has largely been placed been on the social-historical factors which account for the distribution of different groups of English-speaking settlers. This work, of course, provides an indispensable basis for further linguistic investigations, and equally useful are the lexical distributions that have been studied. In the phonological field, however, there is an urgent need for more material based on first-hand phonetic observation.

2. The present article sets out to analyse phonetically the English spoken in the Vancouver area, specifically among the younger generation. Some fifty local students, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty-two, have co-operated in this exploratory analysis during the last two years, and the detailed investigation of their speech has been supplemented and checked by further investigation outside the group.

With a few important exceptions, such as Berko (1958) and Derwing and Baker (1977), linguistic morphology has always been a descriptive science, content with investigating actually occurring words and extracting patterns from these. Consequently, it has suffered from a difficulty common to all descriptive endeavours, the fear of obscuring individual cases in abstracting to general principles. In turn, as a result of this deficiency, morphological theory has tended to expend its energy not on general patterns, but rather on single words: more thought has been devoted to the one English word sang than to most other topics. In an earlier paper, Aronoff and Schvaneveldt (1978) showed how an experimental technique borrowed from cognitive psychology, the Lexical Decision Task, could be used to investigate morphological patterns without focusing primary attention on single actually occurring words. The essence of the technique is to ask native speakers of a language (English in this case) whether certain stimuli are words of their language or not.

In recent work in feature geometry, the internal structure of the Place node has been the subject of attention. In the earliest work, the place features [anterior], [coronal], [high], [low], [back], and [round] proposed by Chomsky and Halle (1968) were arrayed under the Place node (Clements 1985). In later work it was argued that such an arrangement did not capture the classes required for operations involving place of articulation, and it was proposed that unary articulator features Labial, Coronal, and Dorsal be used, with [anterior], [high], [low], [back], and [round] being dependents of these major articulators (Sagey 1986; McCarthy 1988). This structure, which I will call the “flat structure”, is diagrammed in (1).

Prior research has suggested that Korean might constitute an exception to the proposed notion of the universality of the rhyme. Five experiments were performed to test this hypothesis out with native speakers of that language. Four different experimental tasks were employed: a global sound similarity judgement task, a concept formation task, a unit reduplication task, and a list recall task. In all cases the results indicate that Korean syllables were seen to contain a cohesive CV or body unit, in contrast to the VC of rhyme unit of English. The final experiment, involving list recall, was considered especially important, as it involved the testing of preliterate children, whose results could not have been influenced by knowledge of the orthography. An attempt is made to explain these findings in terms of intrinsic properties of the syllables in the two languages. The theoretical significance of this research is also discussed.

In this paper, we will investigate certain phenomena which appear sensitive to particular conditions of adjacency and provide an explanation of these conditions in terms of syntactic structure and principles defined over such structure. Two interesting results which follow from such an explanation are: (i) the Case Filter given in (1) below, which stipulates that phonetically realized NPs must receive Case, may be subsumed under the Empty Category Principle, and (ii) the claim that only Case-marked traces are visible at PF (which has been suggested as an explanation of wanna contraction facts) can be given a structural account.

Nous présentons les résultats d’une étude empirique du discours mixte arabe marocain/français dont le but est de situer ce discours par rapport aux théories de l’emprunt et de l’alternance. Nous nous basons en grande partie sur l’analyse quantitative de la distribution des contextes syntaxiques où se juxtaposent des éléments des deux langues.

Using the Criterial Freezing approach to movement and chain formation (Rizzi 2005, 2006, 2014; Rizzi and Shlonsky 2006, 2007), this study explores the strategies Jordanian Arabic makes available for subject extraction. I argue that subject extraction in this variety of Arabic is constrained by the postulated D-linking condition of the Subject Criterion – i.e., [spec,SubjP] is filled by an element with the same D(iscourse)-linking status as that of the subject wh-word (D-linked vs. non-D-linked). In case of questions with a D-linked wh-word, [spec,SubjP] can be filled by the D-linked particle illi or a deictic (time-point/place-point) adjunct. Unlike time-point adjuncts, the use of place-point adjuncts to fill [spec,SubjP] is subject to the effects of the Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky 2001), given their low base positions. In contrast, in case of questions with a non-D-linked wh-word, I assume that [spec,SubjP] is filled by an expletive pro.

Not long ago a Torontonian shopping in a large department store just across the border asked where he could find chesterfields. On following directions, he was somewhat dismayed to find himself at the cigar counter!

Such experiences often occur in life along the border, as any Ontarioan who has tried to buy blinds or serviettes in New York or Michigan will know. When he has been across the line for some time, however, he discovers that most of his neighbours pull down their shades before retiring and tuck in their table napkins before eating spaghetti Italian style. The visitor from Ontario who stays with American friends just south of the line learns that they turn on faucets at the kitchen sink rather than taps and hold up their pants with suspenders, not braces (trousers is “elegant diction” for most men in both countries.)

Traditional accounts of style isolate individual variables and situate their use along a formality scale. Because it abstractly represents speaker interaction, this approach imposes a taxonomic distinction between stylistic and social constraints. By focussing on single variables in isolation, such accounts wrench individual variables out of the context that defines them. Recent accounts of style recognise the context-dependency of social meaning. We must therefore consider how a particular combination of linguistic and extralinguistic resources interact to produce an overall style that subsumes the traditional style/social constraint distinction. I explore how the styles created by a community of girls function to produce a system of distinction (Irvine 2001) in their high school, by considering how each group uses morphosyntactic and discourse-related variables to define themselves in relation to other social groups. The analysis reveals that sociolinguistic meaning is never achieved by a single group in isolation, but is the consequence of a collaborative negotiation of available resources.

The following pages sketch a system of constraints intended to sharpen and organize a number of current assumptions surrounding the concept of “prosodic licensing”, as proposed in Itô (1988) and further developed in later work (Bagemihl 1991; Charette 1990; Goldsmith 1990; Inkelas 1991; Itô and Mester 1991; Kaye 1990; Lombardi 1991; Piggott 1991; Zec 1988; and others). The proposal to be developed below draws on Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993); one of the goals is to explicate the notion of the coda as a “secondary licenser” (Goldsmith 1990) and to clarify the privileged status of geminate and partial geminate clusters (Prince 1984) with respect to syllabification. After laying out some background assumptions (Section 1), we present the definitions and constraints that form the core of our theory of licensing (Section 2). We illustrate the approach with an analysis of the syllable structure of Japanese (Section 3) and conclude the paper with a discussion of remaining issues and problems relating to the general typology of syllabification systems (Section 4).

This article explores wh-questions in Persian and examines how the “clausal typing hypothesis” and the “focus-fronting analysis” fare with respect to Persian wh-questions. It is shown that Persian wh-questions involve obligatory movement of wh-phrases to a preverbal focus position. This movement is different from syntactic wh-movement in that it does not involve movement of the wh-phrase to [Spec, CP], whose trigger is a [+wh] feature in C. Thus, in terms of the typology of wh-questions, Persian is neither a syntactic wh-movement nor a wh-in-situ language; rather, it should be classified with languages such as Aghem, Basque, Hungarian, Kirundi, and Serbo-Croatian, in which wh-phrases have been argued to undergo focus movement. It is shown that Persian does not seem to share the properties of Serbo-Croatian, another focus-fronting language. Some possible explanations are provided and the theoretical implications are discussed.

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, I shall propose a unified account of the subject doubling construction and point out its similarities and differences with respect to object doubling — the so-called clitic doubling. The discussion is based on Trentino, a northern dialect of Italian, and Colloquial French. I will argue that it is not desirable to establish a connection between subject doubling and free inversion as is implicitly assumed in Safir (1982). Rather, it seems preferable to assume that the subject clitics are generated in the AGR element of INFL and that they are associated with pro in subject position. The possibility of subject doubling is then related to a parameter making reference to the optionality of Case absorbtion or spell-out by the clitic.

Québec City has had an anglophone community for 250 years. A representative sample of this community was surveyed using the methods known as Dialect Topography. The analysis establishes the distinctiveness of Québec City English but at the same time shows that it is firmly planted in the Canadian English speech community. It is shown that there are significant correlations with three social factors: (1) Language Use Index, which allows a calculation of the extent of each respondent’s use of English in the francophone setting; (2) age, the principal correlate of changes in progress; and (3) Regionality Index, which separates indigènes, the natives of the region, from interlopers, recent arrivals. Although the results show that the distinctiveness may be threatened by the persistence of interloper variants, in most respects Québec City English favours the same variants as the rest of Canada, albeit with different frequencies and often with a unique historical development.

A competence grammar of English must account for the English speaker’s ability to predict the shape of the regular past tense morpheme on the basis of the stem-final segment, faced, for example, with a neologistic verb like *rolk or *glag. But whether efficient processing of known words routinely utilizes this creative ability is another matter. Efficient on-line processing may favour selection from a store over computation. To what extent selection and computation are balanced in on-line production may even be different from the balance required in efficient comprehension.

It would appear therefore that not only is behaviour not a criterion for possession of knowledge — it is in fact only one kind of evidence for it — but also that the constructs required in characterizing competence cannot serve as the only criteria for determining the forms of processing. The evidence from both domains can support but not disconfirm the hypotheses of the other. Nevertheless, the grammars being produced within the generative paradigm are beginning to have the requisite richness of detail that must underly the capacity for language use. As such they provide independently motivated and sufficiently elaborate hypotheses regarding the structures and processes underlying production, allowing the production theorist a preliminary distinction between crucial facts and those best considered irrelevant.

Typically, a study of variation starts from the known and works its way into the unknown. But what happens when you are analyzing variation at the same time as you are grappling with the fundamental structure of the language? Whereas variationist methods often involve doing strategic violence to the data, isolating single variables, documentation tends to encourage a broader perspective. This article shows how documentation of Nkep (Central Eastern Oceanic, Vanuatu) has progressed when guided by a focus on internal and social variation. Three variables are discussed (the near merger of two front vowels, lexical borrowing, and the expression of subject agreement) to highlight the rewards and challenges associated with drawing together two subdisciplines (variation and documentation) that have not traditionally had much to say to each other. Analyzing variation alongside documentation encourages us to write ‘symphonies of variation’, as opposed to ‘sonatas’ of individual variables.

The morphological shape of a noun in Berber is determined by the syntactic context in which it appears. The alternation is between what has come to be known as the Construct State and the Free State. Since the alternation is syntactically determined, it has been suggested that the State phenomenon may be a form of case (cf. Prasse 1974; Chaker 1983; Bader and Kenstowicz 1984; Ouhalla 1988). But the link between Case and State has not been established in a conclusive manner. One reason why the nature of the Construct State has remained a puzzling aspect of Berber is that the contexts in which the Construct State forms appear and those where the Free State forms appear do not seem to constitute natural classes. For instance, most prepositions take a Construct State complement, but some take Free State forms. The subject of a verb in the VSO order is in the Construct but a left dislocated subject is not. The object of a verb is in the Free State, but when it is clitic doubled it is in the Construct State.

In this article it is shown that Persian has core control constructions in which the obligatorily empty subject of an embedded clause takes its reference from an antecedent in the next higher clause. Evidence is provided that these embedded clauses are relatively transparent for scrambling and lack independent tense. It is therefore argued that core control verbs in Persian take complements that lack CP, TP, and a Case position for their subjects. Control complements do manifest subject agreement, however, suggesting that agreement checking takes place within vP. The implications of this view are explored with respect to the periphrastic progressive construction, in which both the auxiliary and the main verb bear subject agreement, and raising constructions, in which preposed subjects do not trigger agreement on the matrix verb. The relevant contrast is presented in minimalist terms as the idea that agreement in Persian is checked within a strong phase (CP or vP).

Ideophones are described as expressive marked linguistic units with a dramaturgic depictive function. Although commonly regarded in traditional general linguistics as rare and marginal, recent research on this topic has shown that these elements are pervasive in all languages and that they might share some linguistic characteristics across languages. This article analyses Basque ideophones from a typological perspective. The main goal is to describe the structure, meaning and function of Basque ideophones and to discuss how the Basque ideophonic system fits into the cross-linguistic characterisation of these linguistic units.