Acoustic research on the prosody and intonation of Northwest Coast languages has until recently been under-researched. This paper joins the growing body of research on the subject and reports on the results of the first study of intonation in St’át'imcets (Lillooet Salish; Northern Interior Salish). It tests the generalization proposed by Davis (2007) that information structure is not correlated with prosody in Salish languages by comparing the intonation contours of declaratives and yes/no questions. Specifically, I ask two questions: is nuclear accent rightmost? And are yes/no questions associated with higher pitch, as predicted by the Universality of Intonational Meaning? Results are comparable to those reported for other Salish languages, namely Koch (2008, 2011) on Nɬeʔkepmxcín, Jacobs (2007) on Skwxwú7mesh and Benner (2004, 2006) and Leonard (2011) on SENĆOŦEN. Nuclear accent is associated with the rightmost stressed vowel, regardless of focus, and while no speaker signals yes/no questions with a final rise, each has higher pitch within typologically common parameters.

This paper presents an analysis of reflexives in Shona. Taking seriously the observation that the reflexive morpheme zvi- is homophonous with one of Shona's object markers, I argue that this homophony is not accidental. Rather, the morpheme that emerges in reflexive contexts is object marking triggered by a covert anaphor. The analysis rests on two planks: first, establishing that zvi- is the default agreement form in the language generally; and second, establishing that a covert anaphor may trigger such an agreement. In so doing, a treatment of object marking as the exponence of discourse-givenness is advanced. The analysis is compatible with treatments of object marking in Shona as either an agreement affix or a clitic. Theoretical issues related to default agreement, covert anaphors, and distinctions between discourse-givenness and topicality are also discussed, along with an alternative account treating zvi- as a valence-reducing derivational affix.

This paper investigates the correlative construction in Isbukun Bunun, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan. I show that in this language the correlative clause and its associated anaphoric element do not form a constituent at any point in the derivation. Drawing on evidence from island-insensitivity, the absence of Condition C effects and non-constituency facts, I propose that the syntactic relation between the correlative clause and the nominal correlate is derived by a base-generated adjunction structure. Moreover, I argue that the correlative clause, which behaves as a generalized quantifier, binds the nominal correlate phrase in the matrix clause, which is construed as a bound variable. The proposed quantificational binding view is further shown to capture the types of correlate phrases allowed in Isbukun Bunun correlatives.

Stressed syllables in European Portuguese contrast seven oral vowels, /i, u, e, o, ε, ɔ, a/, which are reduced to a simpler four-vowel set in unstressed syllables. Although /a/ never undergoes any phonological neutralization through vowel reduction, it has a raised allophone [ɐ] which occurs in several environments