When words are borrowed from one language into another, they are often adapted to conform with the phonological constraints of the borrowing language. This article looks at the adaptation of six hundred loanwords from French and English into Lama in light of the predictions of the Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies. The Lama data support the Minimality Principle, which predicts that ill-formed structures will be repaired as economically as possible, and the Preservation Principle, which predicts that epenthesis will be favoured over deletion. They also support the claim that the form in which loanwords are stored in the borrowing language is equivalent to the output of the phonology of the source language, even when that includes segments which are ill-formed in the borrowing language. However, the Lama data do not support the Threshold Principle, which predicts deletion when adaptation would be too costly.

The term ‘componential analysis’ is used here to refer to the theory of semantic structure developed by Goodenough (1956, 1965, etc.), Lounsbury (1956, 1964, etc.) and others. Obviously the notion of a semantic component - or ‘feature,’ or whatever other term is applied - is common to a wide variety of semantic theories, and ‘componential analysis’ is sometimes used (e.g. by Lyons 1968) to cover the whole of this wider field; nevertheless the Goodenough-Lounsbury theory is sufficiently unified and different from others to warrant separate treatment.

Although the theory is intended to be, and undoubtedly is, much more widely applicable, a great deal of the descriptive work in componential analysis is in the field of kinship terminologies, and the basic concepts of the theory may conveniently be exemplified from this semantic domain. Drawing on the sign theory of Charles Morris, Goodenough distinguishes between the denotatum, designatum and significatum of a word (1965: 286 n.3):

The point of this paper is an extremely simple and not at all a surprising one, one that is in no way new. It is essentially the following: the native speakers of any language know its structure and the linguist doing field work can make use of this knowledge in ways other than the obvious one of asking an informant to produce utterances, with little or no other direction. What I hope to do here is outline briefly a set of strategies or field-work techniques developed during the past two years in a field methods course at the University of Illinois. In particular, I will describe certain aspects of our research on Papago done in co-operation with Mr. Albert Alvarez, a Papago speaker, who served as assistant in the course during the academic year 1963-64.

The following notes are based on findings obtained in a pilot study of the speech of English-speaking residents of Montreal, which was carried out from 1957 to 1958. The data was obtained by circulating a questionnaire designed to elicit information on vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar and syntax. In general, the choice of items for inclusion in this questionnaire was restricted to those which illustrate differences between British and American usage. In the vocabulary section, a further restriction was made in that no items pertaining exclusively to rural life were included.

With respect to the selection of informants there were several deviations from the established methods of linguistic surveys. In most surveys it is usual to insist that informants belong to families which have been established in the area under investigation for several generations, and that they speak no other language but English.

As children learn language, they spontaneously imitate the speech of those around them. This article investigates the new words that five children imitated between 1 and 2 years of age. Children were more likely to imitate new words as they aged and as their productive language developed. After controlling for age, children also were more likely to imitate new words that were shorter and with high neighborhood densities, and that contained sounds the children had previously produced accurately. Together, the findings demonstrate that both the patterns of the target words and children's productive abilities are predictors of children's imitative speech. This supports models of language development where there are influences stemming not only from phonological and lexical representations, but also from phonetic representations.

This article reports on a study of ethnic variation in the phonetics of Montreal English. The speech of 93 native speakers of Montreal English from three ethnic groups, British-Irish, Italian and Jewish, was recorded and subjected to acoustic analysis. Several statistically significant differences among the ethnic groups were identified. The present paper undertakes an apparent-time analysis of these differences, to see whether they are getting smaller over time, as might be expected under the assumption that post-immigrant generations gradually assimilate to the linguistic and cultural patterns of their adopted homelands. While Jewish Montrealers show some signs of convergence with the British-origin standard, Italians — especially young Italian men—appear to be diverging from that model. It is suggested that the unusual persistence and even intensification of ethno-phonetic variation in English-speaking Montreal reflects both the residential and social self-segregation of its ethnic communities and the local dominance of French.

Nasalization in several Bantu languages skips vowels and, in some cases, also skips consonants. This process does not appear to apply in a local fashion. A solution to the locality problem has not been found so far in the conventional approaches to harmony. This article offers a novel analysis which maintains the general principle that elements related by rules or constraints are adjacent. It departs from the conventional description of harmony as a purely segmental relation and derives the effects of long distance consonant nasalization from the reconfiguration of harmony as a relation between suprasegmental units. One pattern found in Lamba is described as agreement between adjacent syllables, while another pattern found in Kikongo instantiates agreement between adjacent feet. This article recognizes a new functional foot-type, the Harmony Foot.

Recently, there has been a surge of psycholinguistic research on the interpretation of type-shifting constructions. We evaluate some of the theoretical and empirical research in this area and propose a reassessment of the nature of type-shifting operations.

We argue, in particular, for a structural gap in type-shifting constructions, motivated mainly by the restructuring nature of the verbs employed. We also argue that the putative underspecification (or indeterminacy) of type-shifting constructions is resolved via pragmatic inferences.

This study investigates the development of wh-questions in French in a group of bilingual French-Dutch children. Fifteen children (aged 4 to 8, mean age 6;03, first exposure to French under age 4 for most of the children) participated in an elicited production task. Their results were compared to those of 4-year-old and 6-year-old monolingual children from a previous study. In order to examine possible influence from Dutch, two main hypotheses with contrasting predictions are proposed: structural overlap and derivational complexity. The results show that the bilingual children exhibited the same developmental course for wh-questions as their monolingual peers. The majority of responses involved wh-fronting without inversion, whereas wh-fronting with inversion, the only possible structure in Dutch, was not frequent. Therefore, the results do not provide clear evidence for influence from Dutch. Instead, they confirm that derivational complexity constrains the development of wh-questions in French.

In this article, the acquisition of French subject and object pronouns by Anouk, a French-Dutch bilingual girl is studied and compared with the acquisition by monolingual French children. At first sight there are no major differences between Anouk and the children discussed in the literature. There are however some indications that the status of the pronouns in Anouk’s data is not the same as that in the monolingual data. In Anouk’s data, there are no utterances where a quantified nominal subject is doubled by a subject clitic. Consequently, it is impossible to argue that her subject pronouns have the status of agreement markers which they are claimed to have in the case of monolingual children. Moreover, Anouk acquires both subject and object pronouns at roughly the same moment—to what is found for the monolinguals. Finally, Anouk makes position errors with object pronouns which are similar to those found in French L2 acquisition data. It is proposed that this may be due to the (indirect) influence of Dutch, her other language.

This study examines the relationship between lexical frequency and s-lenition in Barranquillero Spanish, looking at lexical frequency as a scalar variable. A quantitative analysis of /s/ in words of different lexical frequencies, in which productions from a reading task were submitted to auditory acoustical analysis, reveals that the single most important factor in s-lenition is lexical frequency. Speakers tend towards a full articulation of /s/ in low-frequency words, while weakening it in high-frequency words. This study addresses three questions: Do subtle differences in lexical frequency influence how sounds are produced synchronically? What are the advantages of considering lexical frequency in scalar terms as opposed to a categorical variable (high vs. low-frequency)? What is the relationship between lexical frequency and other linguistic factors?

This article discusses the syntactic and semantic properties of descriptive relative clauses, a type of relative clause discussed in the literature on Chinese. It is argued that descriptive relative clauses are found in the dialect of Upper Austria, a version of Bavarian German. In particular this dialect has a set of reduced definite articles that are used for discourse referents that are intrinsically uniquely identifiable, as a matter of world knowledge. As such, they cannot be restricted by a relative clause, where restriction is taken to exclude alternatives. Such DPs can, however, be modified by descriptive relative clauses. I propose that descriptive relative clauses attach to NP while restrictive relative clauses attach to nP. Thus, the article contributes to determining whether there are different relative clauses associated with different layers of projections in the nominal domain.

The main goal of this article is to provide a more global approach to the question of cooccurrence restrictions which hold among classes of segments in Hamito-Semitic languages. It is demonstrated that the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) combined with the directionality conventions is not sufficient to predict all of the observed cooccurrence restrictions found in the Classical Arabic verb root and that it is necessary to postulate two other constraints that interact with the OCP. By establishing a parallel between the facts observed in Classical Arabic and the labial dissimilations in two other Hamito-Semitic languages, Akkadian and Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber, it is argued that, at the Proto-Hamito-Semitic stage, the OCP hierarchically dominated the Multiple Association Constraint operative at the level of articulator nodes, but that this hierarchy is no longer synchronically manifested in languages like Arabic and Hebrew. The existence of a constraint that imposes a minimal sonority distance on rising sonority contours is also postulated to account for an asymmetry indicating a tendency to prefer certain sequences of segments over the reverse order.

This article engages questions about translation, phonological iconicity, and seductive ideophony. I begin by discussing the work of Paul Friedrich as it relates to questions of linguistic relativity and poetics and the qualities of music and myth that constitute poetry. I then present a poem written in Navajo by Rex Lee Jim and four translations of the poem. Three are from Navajo consultants and one of those translations will be, from a certain perspective, rather surprising. Namely, why does one consultant translate this poem as if it is composed of ideophones? The fourth translation is mine. I then work through the morphology of the poem in Navajo, saying something more about the translators and the process of translation. I then provide a transcript of a conversation I had with Blackhorse Mitchell about this poem. I use this to take up questions of phonological iconicity (punning) and the seductive quality of ideophony (the pole of music). I also place this poem within a context of the stick game in Navajo philosophy (the pole of myth). This leads, in the conclusion, to reflections about linguistic relativity, misunderstandings, sound, and poetics.

Even though null definite objects are usually ungrammatical in English, they are widely used in certain special registers. This paper investigates object drop in the recipe and, to a lesser extent, match broadcasting registers in English, contributing an analysis of a substantial set of naturally occuring data, hence making it possible to verify observations from previous syntactic studies of the phenomenon, which were based on a restricted array of isolated sentences. Having shown that the data support the assumption that the unrealised object is syntactically active, I propose a novel analysis of missing objects in special registers, guided by recent developments in the generative linguistic theory. Null realisation of the object is considered as an issue of externalisation and intralinguistic variation is attributed to the rules operating at the SM interface which make it possible to extend the application of copy deletion, as assumed within the copy theory of movement

Il est plus éeconomique et naturel de rendre compte de certaines régles phonologiques lorsque nous analysons les contextes dans lesquels elles s’appliquent en tenant compte de la structure syllabique. La première théorie qui a été élaborée sur cette base, dans le cadre génératif, est celle de Kahn (1976). Par la suite, d’autres ont suivi. Celle que je retiendrai pour nos fins est la théorie de Liberman et Prince (1977). C’est en me servant de leurs théories que je vais démontrer, dans la deuxième partie de cet article, certains avantages que comporte une telle analyse, L’analyse en structure syllabique fait très bien ressortir le rôle de l’accent dans la formation des syllabes. Je crois que la structure de ces dernières doit être prise en considération pour rendre compte d’une règle comme celle que l’on a baptisé “Canadian Raising.” Les principales données qui furent utilisées pour la formulation de la règle de Canadian Raising ont été rapportées, il y a plus de 35 ans, par Joos (1942). Chambers (1973) a repris la question et nous offre une réanalyse dans le cadre de la théorie de Chomsky et Halle (1968; voir aussi King 1972, Picard 1977). C’est la formulation de la règle de Canadian Raising que Chambers a présentée que je vais réviser dans la deuxième partie de l’article. La première partie servira à la présentation de cette règle.

Ideally, the grammar of a language should tell us whkh sequences of words form sentences and which sequences don’t. It is doubtful whether any existing grammar achieves this end for one of the natural languages, such as English, Russian or Chinese. However, logicians have constructed certain artificial languages (e. g. the prepositional calculus) together with a set of rules which distinguish between sentences (or well-formed formulas, as logicians prefer to call them) and non-sentences. While it is premature to attempt a complete description of English, partial grammars have been constructed.

In this paper we shall consider a fragment of English containing the names John and Jane, the verbs must, work, call, have, be, the adverb today, the conjunctions but and while and a few other words of the same types. We also admit inflected forms such as works, worked, working, etc. We shall attempt to-decide which sequences of these word-forms are sentences and which are not. Our grammar, if successful, must tell us that “John must have been calling Jane today” is a sentence, and that “John has must call Jane” is not a sentence. However, we may as well admit that many sentences will escape our net, owing to the fact that certain constructions, e. g. the gerund, will not be considered here.

This study examines the acquisition of a familiar and widely studied syntactic phenomenon, preposition stranding, within the framework of transformational generative grammar. According to Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar (UG), children begin the acquisition task with an innate knowledge of universal principles of grammar. Many of these principles have open parameters with marked and unmarked options which must be set by children on the basis of their linguistic input. The marked setting entails the unmarked setting in that if a language allows the marked structures it will also allow the relevant unmarked structures, but the reverse is not necessarily true.

A previous panel study of 59 speakers of Montreal French showed an increase in inflected futures (IF) at the expense of periphrastic futures (PF) as this population aged, running counter to the direction of historical change: reduction of IF. Matching two samples of speakers across the same time interval by age and social characteristics, the current trend study investigates whether or not this increase reflects retrograde change in the speech community. Results show community stability over the same period, confirming the earlier age grading interpretation and disconfirming any possibility that the disappearance of IF may be reversing. We propose that this pattern of retrograde lifespan change may emerge from a combination of social forces typically found in late stages of language change, with concomitant stylistic effect. Further, such a pattern may suggest the mechanism that creates a very long tail for retreating variants.