Donca Steriade

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Historical linguistics is a dynamic and vibrant field with multifaceted goals. Historical linguists reconstruct a language’s linguistic past and reveal the history of its speakers. They elucidate mechanisms underlying language change and unravel complex interactions between people throughout the ages and space. Yet, historical linguistics is not a...

This entry analyses forms of syncretism whose participant expressions – lexically related words or stems, or affixes – appear to be arbitrarily selected. The entry evaluates the evidence for these phenomena and considers some independently justified alternatives for their analysis, including non‐automatic phonological processes and conditions on th...

This volume contains a selection of 18 peer-reviewed papers presented at the 31st edition of Going Romance. Phenomena found in Romance languages (European Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian), in Romance dialects (Cosentino, Salentino, southern Calabrese, Neapolitan, and Trevigiano), and even in creoles with a Romance lexifier (Makista a...

This volume is a collection of original contributions to the study of lexical allomorphy, with a focus on Optimality Theory’s distinctive take on this topic. The chapters provide an up-to-date perspective on the advances in our understanding of allomorphy which Optimality Theory has been able to secure (in comparison with rule-based Generative Phon...

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Phonetic Sources of Phonological Patterns: Synchronic and Diachronic Explanations (2003)

Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Semantic Typology and Semantic Universals (1993)

Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1984), pp. 47-64

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1982. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 380-385). Photocopy. s

A collection of essays on the word by colleagues, students, and teachers of linguist Paul Kiparsky that reflects his distinctive focus and his influence on the field. Paul Kiparsky's work in linguistics has been wide-ranging and fundamental. His contributions as a scholar and teacher have transformed virtually every subfield of contemporary linguis...

A recurrent issue in linguistic theory and psychology concerns the cognitive status of memorized lists and their internal structure. In morphological theory, the collections of inflected forms of a given noun, verb, or adjective into inflectional paradigms are thought to constitute one such type of list. This book focuses on the question of which e...

Are speakers equipped with preferences concerning grammatical structures that are absent in their language? We examine this question by investigating the sensitivity of English speakers to the sonority of onset clusters. Linguistic research suggests that certain onset clusters are universally preferred (e.g., bd>lb). We demonstrate that such prefer...

Phonetically-based phonology is centered around the hypothesis that phonologies of languages are determined by phonetic principles; that is, phonetic patterns involving ease of articulation and perception are expressed linguistically as grammatical constraints. This book--a collection of essays by a team of leading scholars--provides a wide-ranging...

This chapter examines the phonology of perceptibility effects and proposes a distinct grammatical component called the P-map (P stands for perceptibility), a set of statements about relative perceptibility of different contrasts in various positions. It argues that nasalization, C-deletion, and so forth are unattested as responses to the voicing pr...

this paper will be just how much invariance counts as enough for the purpose of satisfying grammatical conditions like (1). The assumption in current and earlier work is that the relevant measure of invariance is the identity of phonological representations. Thus we might assume that the stem final [m] of [bAm] has the same phonological feature com...

Introduction The project presented here seeks to explain observed regularities in the direction of place assimilation. The best known among these is the fact that assimilation proceeds regressively in intervocalic clusters composed of alveolars, palato-alveolars, labials or velars. This fact is consistent with a variety of interpretations, some of...

This paper identifies the phonological side of lexical conservatism: phonological processes are, under certain circumstances, blocked from creating novel phonological variants to a listed stem. Rather than generating new allomorphs, speakers recycle already existing ones, even when none of the listed allomorphs gives full satisfaction to the applic...

Introduction The object of this study are the phonological mechanisms that signal lexical relations. To indicate that a form is closely related to another, in semantic content or morphosyntactic function, speakers employ similarities of phonological shape. For instance a nonce word like aspiratory ["oespIrtori] will be interpreted as related to spi...

This study explores the hypothesis that the invariant properties characterizing lexical items include non contrastive phonetic details such as the amount of linguopalatal contact, or aspects of inter-gestural timing. We show that, in French, a sequence of consonants resulting from the loss of schwa maintains some of the fine articulatory characteri...

Introduction 2 0.1. Licensing: by cue or by prosody 2 0.2. Phonetics in phonology: the downward arrow and alternatives 3 0.3. An example of cue licensing: retroflexion 4 0.4. Cues 6 0.5. Cue weighting 9 0.6. Cue duration 10 0.7. The descriptive system 10 0.8. Excessive variability 13 0.9. Extensions 14 0.9.1 Direct reference to cues? 14 0.9.2 Inter...

Phonotactic statements characterize contextual restrictions on the occurrence of segments or feature values. This study argues that consonantal phonotactics are best understood as syllable-independent, string-based conditions reflecting positional differences in the perceptibility of contrasts. The analyses proposed here have better empirical cover...

Eisner's (1997a) Primitive Optimality Theory is a simple formal model of a subset of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). The work presented here implements this model and extends it. The implementation is used to evaluate the Primitive Optimality Theory model, and is in itself a useful tool for linguistic analysis. The model is evaluated...

Phonologists study contour segments as a class because they represent a paradox. On the one hand, they are tautosyllabic onset sequences even in languages where no other onset clusters are allowed. On the other hand, they are phonetic sequences of distinct gestures, each of which can be identified with a separate segment: /nd/ contains something th...

This collection of papers presents current research in speech science. The unifying theme of the collection is the relationship between phonological representations of the grammatical structure of speech, and physical models of the production and perception of actual utterances. The authors, including leading specialists from the fields of phonolog...

The phenomenon studied in this paper is the correspondence between the syllabic position of segments copied in reduplication and the syllabic position of their base counterparts. I will document this correlation and propose a model of reduplication that explains it.

A study of half-rhymes (HR's) in Romanian poetry reveals that poets systematically prefer HR's corresponding to certain common phonological processes: final devoicing, post-nasal voicing, nasal-place neutralization, stressless vowel reduction, coda cluster simplification, nasalized vowel centralization, liquid metathesis. The striking observation i...

The first studies of generative morphology, Halle's (1973) "Prolegomena" and Aronoff's (1976) "Word Formation", have identified the phenomenon of blocking: a pre-existing, listed word blocks productive word formation processes from creating potential synonyms to it. Because of fury, *furiousness is blocked: it cannot be used in any of the senses kn...

This study presents data showing articulatory differences between a sequence of consonants resulting from the loss of schwa and underlying consonant sequences. For example "d'rôle" 'some role', with the apostrophe indicating schwa loss, remains articulatorily distinct from "drôle" 'funny'. These differences involve non contrastive phonetic details...

Thèse (Maîtrise) - Université Laval. Bibliogr.: ff. 138-147.