scholarly journals Italian preconsonantal s-voicing is not regressive voice assimilation

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bálint Huszthy
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Word Boundary ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Sibilant Fricatives ◽  
Synchronic Comparison

Abstract In the literature of laryngeal phonology Romance languages are considered voice languages, exhibiting a binary distinction between a voiced lenis and a voiceless fortis set of obstruents. Voice languages are characterised by regressive voice assimilation (RVA) due to the phonological activity of [voice]. Italian manifests a process similar to RVA, called preconsonantal s-voicing; that is, /s/ becomes voiced before voiced consonants. Since /sC/ is the only obstruent cluster in Italian phonotactics, Italian seems to fulfil the requirements for being a prototypical voice language. However, this paper argues that s-voicing is not an instance of RVA, at least from a synchronic phonological point of view. RVA and Italian preconsonantal s-voicing essentially differ at every level of a synchronic comparison: in the input, in the trigger, in the domain of application and in the frequency of the processes. In Italian only sibilant fricatives may undergo voicing before consonants; however, other obstruents (which mostly appear in loanwords) do not assimilate for [voice]. Italian preconsonantal s-voicing does not take place at the word boundary or at morpheme boundaries, and it seems to be optional is new loanwords; thus, it is not a postlexical process like RVA. The synchronic differences between the two phenomena are analysed in Classical Optimality Theory. The laryngeal system of Italian prefers faithfulness over markedness, which means that non-/sC/ obstruent clusters surface with underlying voice values; while the voicing of /s/ before voiced consonants is seen as phonetic and not phonological.

Phonologically conditioned allomorphy in the morphology of Surmiran (Rumantsch)

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen R. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
General Framework ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Morphological Properties ◽  
Entire System ◽  
Verbal System ◽  
Extended Sense ◽  
Phonological Rule

Alternations between allomorphs that are not directly related by phonological rule, but whose selection is governed by phonological properties of the environment, have attracted the sporadic attention of phonologists and morphologists. Such phenomena are commonly limited to rather small corners of a language's structure, however, and as a result have not been a major theoretical focus. This paper examines a set of alternations in Surmiran, a Swiss Rumantsch language, that have this character and that pervade the entire system of the language. It is shown that the alternations in question, best attested in the verbal system, are not conditioned by any coherent set of morphological properties (either straightforwardly or in the extended sense of ‘morphomes’ explored in other Romance languages by Maiden). These alternations are, however, straightforwardly aligned with the location of stress in words, and an analysis is proposed within the general framework of Optimality Theory to express this. The resulting system of phonologically conditioned allomorphy turns out to include the great majority of patterning which one might be tempted to treat as productive phonology, but which has been rendered opaque (and subsequently morphologized) as a result of the working of historical change.

From a perceptual point of view, is there prosodic continuity between languages in contact?

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-572
Author(s):  
Ana Ma. Fernández Planas ◽  
Paolo Roseano ◽  
Wendy Elvira-García ◽  
Josefina Carrera Sabaté ◽  
Domingo Román Montes de Oca
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Acoustic Data ◽  
Languages In Contact

Abstract This paper contains the results of a set of perception tests that aimed at measuring perceived prosodic distances between different Romance languages (Italian, Friulian, Sardinian, Catalan, and Spanish). Data were collected within the framework of the AMPER project. The results were obtained by means of discrimination and identification tasks where the judges were 31 native speakers of Catalan form Barcelona and the stimuli were broad focus statements and yes-no questions in the above-mentioned languages. The perceived distances are then compared with the results of a dialectometric analysis of acoustic data. This comparison shows that the perceived distances are related to acoustic differences.

A discourse-based approach to some uses of the conjunction que in Romance languages

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa M. Rodríguez Ramalle
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
Shared Information ◽  
Source Of Information

The present paper compares and contrasts patterns of variation exhibited by the conjunction que in Spanish, Catalan and Italian, in root sentences — such as Que te digo que me dejes en paz (‘I’m telling you to leave me in peace’) or: Que los libros que los necesito (‘As far as the books are concerned, I need them’) — and when it appears in combination with evidential and polarity adverbs — such as Naturalmente que iré contigo (‘Of course, I will go with you’) or: Sí que iré contigo (‘Yes, I will go with you’). The focus will mainly be on the independent realizations of conjunctions in Spanish, but data from Catalan and Italian will also be analyzed, in order to show that the ways of encoding the speaker’s point of view and source of information vary across different languages. My hypothesis is that the existence of structures which combine this conjunction with evidential and polarity adverbs derives from the discourse properties of these syntactic categories. The conjunction itself can be used not only to mark subordination but also as a discourse marker, enabling the speaker to recall previously shared information or knowledge.

scholarly journals Foreword

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-6
Author(s):  
Andrej BEKEŠ
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Optimality Theory ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Scientific Journal ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Present Issue ◽  
Old Chinese ◽  
Second Languages ◽  
Old Japanese ◽  
Technical Article

In line with the journal policy, the present issue of ALA, the last this year, also includes also a paper in Slovene. While striving for an active, open and engaged dialogue with the scientific trends in the research of Asian languages around the world, ALA, as the sole scientific journal devoted to Asian linguistics in Slovenia, also has set before itself the goal to cultivate critical scientific thought and terminology in this field among Slovenian speakers by providing in one of the issues every year also research and technical articles in Slovenian, for the Slovenian reading public, above all for undergraduate students and the interested public at large. This has been a tradition and, I would say, also a duty, respected and eagerly put in practice by those of us who do science, including linguistics, in the context of a relatively small language community, that of Slovenian speakers.The present issue begins with two papers concerned with the perception of phonological and phonetic differences between languages.The first paper, by Ashima AGGARWAL, deals with the acquisition of Hindi voicing and aspiration contrasts by monolingual English speakers in the framework of Optimality theory. The main result, that English learners do perceive aspiration distinction but not voicing contrast, also bears on adult learning of second languages in general.In the second paper, Nina GOLOB examines differences in Japanese and Slovene prosody i.e., accent and intonation, from a phonological point of view. The study shows that there are phonological differences behind some superficial phonetic similarities in the examined phenomena, which represent a difficulty in the acquisition of L2 prosody.In the next paper, Abolfazl MOSAFFA JAHROMI examines the syntactic behaviour of in, an expletive-like morpheme in Persian, and argues in favour of the existence of expletives in Persian, a language which has hitherto generally been considered to have no expletives.The fourth and fifth paper deal with categorisations. The fourth paper deals with typological categorisation based on event framing strategies in Old Chinese and Old Japanese. On the basis of an analysis of available data, Wenchao LI concludes that while Old Chinese employed verb framing, satellite framing and equipollent framing, verb framing was its main pattern, while in Old Japanese all three patterns were employed comparably.The fifth paper, by Sumi YOON, deals with discourse categorisation of Japanese and Korean, both generally considered as “listener-responsible” languages. By analysing apologies in conversations by Japanese and Korean students, both those in their home country and those studying in the US, the author argues for a recategorization of Korean as a “speaker-responsible language”.In the technical article, in Slovene, at the end of this issue, Andrej BEKEŠ investigates the classification of genres in Japanese corpora, based on recent research he has also been involved in. He argues that various modal expressions, such as suppositional adverbs, may provide an interesting base for such classification.

Language Contact and the Lexicon of Romance Languages

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Thibault ◽  
Nicholas LoVecchio
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Linguistic Community ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Rigorous Approach ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Theoretical Issues

The Romance languages have been involved in many situations of language contact. While language contact is evident at all levels, the most visible effects on the system of the recipient language concern the lexicon. The relationship between language contact and the lexicon raises some theoretical issues that are not always adequately addressed, including in etymological lexicography. First is the very notion of what constitutes “language contact.” Contrary to a somewhat dated view, language contact does not necessarily imply physical presence, contemporaneity, and orality: as far as the lexicon is concerned, contact can happen over time and space, particularly through written media. Depending on the kind of extralinguistic circumstances at stake, language contact can be induced by diverse factors, leading to different forms of borrowing. The misleading terms borrowings or loans mask the reality that these are actually adapted imitations—whether formal, semantic, or both—of a foreign model. Likewise, the common Latin or Greek origins of a huge proportion of the Romance lexicon often obscure the real history of words. As these classical languages have contributed numerous technical and scientific terms, as well as a series of “roots,” words coined in one Romance language can easily be reproduced in any other. However, simply reducing a word’s etymology to the origin of its components (classic or otherwise), ignoring intermediate stages and possibly intermediating languages in the borrowing process, is a distortion of word history. To the extent that it is useful to refer to “internationalisms,” related words in different Romance languages merit careful, often arduous research in the process of identifying the actual origin of a given coining. From a methodological point of view, it is crucial to distinguish between the immediate lending language and the oldest stage that can be identified, with the former being more relevant in a rigorous approach to comparative historical lexicology. Concrete examples from Ibero-Romania, Gallo-Romania, Italo-Romania, and Balkan-Romania highlight the variety of different Romance loans and reflect the diverse historical factors particular to each linguistic community in which borrowing occurred.

Investigação histórica do sufixo -eir- na nomeação de vegetais em língua portuguesa

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 127-146
Author(s):  
Natival Simões Neto ◽  
Mário Eduardo Viaro ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
European Expansion ◽  
Plant Names ◽  
Morphological Productivity ◽  
Historical Investigation ◽  
Historical Comparative

A Historical Investigation of the Suffix -eir- for the Naming of Plants in the Portuguese Language. The Latin suffix -ari-, used as a creator of adjectives, developed several meanings during the period of spoken late Latin, as well as in the formation of the Romance languages. One of those meanings, present in the Portuguese suffix -eiro/ -eira, is associated with tree names, based on the name of the corresponding fruit. Quite productive in current modern Portuguese, that suffix was always linked to the denomination of plants in general, some of them not necessarily related to edible fruits or even to fruits. Similarities are found between the Portuguese derivations and other Romance languages. In this text, those similarities were investigated from a historical-comparative point of view. The high convergence in the western Romance languages can be motivated both by a common Latin heritage as by further loanwords, however during the European expansion in the sixteenth century, new plant names were known from the New World and their naming was based on words derived by the same suffix. Keywords: suffixation, Romance linguistics, botanical popular naming, historical morphology, morphological productivity.

The rise of it-clefting in English: areal-typological and contact-linguistic considerations

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARKKU FILPPULA
Keyword(s):  
Historical Linguistic ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Syntactic Features ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Celtic Languages

Recent areal and typological research has brought to light several syntactic features which English shares with the Celtic languages as well as some of its neighbouring western European languages, but not with (all of) its Germanic sister languages, especially German. This study focuses on one of them, viz. the so-called it-cleft construction. What makes the it-cleft construction particularly interesting from an areal and typological point of view is the fact that, although it does not belong to the defining features of so-called Standard Average European (SAE), it has a strong presence in French, which is in the ‘nucleus’ of languages forming SAE alongside Dutch, German, and (northern dialects of) Italian. In German, however, clefting has remained a marginal option, not to mention most of the eastern European languages which hardly make use of clefting at all. This division in itself prompts the question of some kind of a historical-linguistic connection between the Celtic languages (both Insular and Continental), English, and French (or, more widely, Romance languages). Before tackling that question, one has to establish whether it-clefting is part of Old (and Middle) English grammar, and if so, to what extent it is used in these periods. In the first part of this article (sections 2 and 3), I trace the emergence of it-clefts on the basis of data from The York–Toronto–Helsinki Corpus of Old English Prose and The Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, second edition. Having established the gradually increasing use of it-clefts from OE to ME, I move on to discuss the areal distribution of clefting among European languages and its typological implications (section 4). This paves the way for a discussion of the possible role played by language contacts, and especially those with the Celtic languages, in the emergence of it-clefting in English (section 5). It is argued that contacts with the Celtic languages provide the most plausible explanation for the development of this feature of English. This conclusion is supported by the chronological precedence of the cleft construction in the Celtic languages, its prominence in modern-period ‘Celtic Englishes’, and close parallels between English and the Celtic languages with respect to several other syntactic features.

Concordances romanes et convergences balcano-romanes dans les dialects roumains sud-danubiens. Aspects phonétiques, morphologiques et syntaxiques

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-328
Author(s):  
Manuela Nevaci
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
The South ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Balkan Area ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

"Romance Concordances and Balcano-Romance Convergences in the South-Danubian Romanian Dialects. Phonetic, Morphological, and Syntactic Aspects. This paper proposes to emphasise the linguistic similarities of South-Danubian Romanian dialects (Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian) spoken in Albania, Croatia, R. of North Macedonia, Greece and Romania from the perspective of Romance and Balkan elements. We will take into consideration lexical aspects, from the point of view of linguistic contact with Balkan languages, as well as Romance elements that define these historical dialects of common Romanian. Our exposition is based on the broader theme of the relationship between genealogic (Romance features inherited from Latin, speaking of concordances in the Romance languages) and areal (convergences between the Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian dialects of the Romanian language and the languages spoken in the Balkan area). Through the presence of the Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian dialects of Romanian in the Balkans, creating a bridge between Romània and Balkan, a convergence was attained on the one hand with the Romance languages, and, on the other, with Greek, Albanian North Macedonian as Balkan languages. Keywords: South Danubian Romanian dialects, Aromanian dialect, Megleno-Romanian dialect, Istro-Romanian dialect, morphological and syntax dialectal system."

Parasynthesis in Morphology

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudio Iacobini
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
Strong Reduction ◽  
Nominal Form ◽  
The Common ◽  
Diachronic Development ◽  
And Diffusion ◽  
Actual Word

The term parasynthesis is mainly used in modern theoretical linguistics in the meaning introduced by Arsène Darmesteter (1874) to refer to denominal or deadjectival prefixed verbs of the Romance languages (Fr. embarquer ‘to load, to board’) in which the non-prefixed verb (barquer) is not an actual word, and the co-radical nominal form (embarqu-) is not well formed. The Romance parasynthetic verb is characterized with reference to its nominal or adjectival base as the result of the co-occurrence of both a prefix and a suffix (typically of a conversion process, i.e., non-overt derivational marking). The co-occurrence or simultaneity of the two processes has been seen by some scholars as a circumfixation phenomenon, whereby two elements act in combination. The peculiar relationship existing between base and parasynthetic verb is particularly problematic for an Item and Process theoretical perspective since this approach entails the application of one process at a time. Conversely, a Word and Paradigm framework deals more easily with parasynthetic patterns, as parasynthetic verbs are put in relation with prefixed verbs and verbs formed by conversion, without being undermined neither by gaps in derivational patterns nor by the possible concomitant addition of prefixes and suffixes. Due to their peculiar structure, parasynthetic verbs have been matter of investigation even for non-specialists of Romance languages, especially from synchronic (or, better said, achronic) point of view. Attention has been also placed on their diachronic development in that, despite being characteristic of the Romance languages, parasynthetic verbs were already present, although to a lesser extent, in Latin. The diachronic development of parasynthetic verbs is strictly connected with that of spatial verb prefixes from Latin to the Romance languages, with particular reference to their loss of productivity in the encoding of spatial meanings and their grammaticalization into actionality markers. Parasynthetic verbs have been in the Romance languages since their earliest stages and have shown constant productivity and diffusion in all the Romance varieties, thus differing from spatial prefixes, which underwent a strong reduction in productivity in combination with verbs. The term parasynthetic is sometimes also used to refer to nouns and adjectives derived from compounds or in which both a prefix and a suffix are attached to a lexical base. In the case of nominal and adjectival formation, there is much less consensus among scholars on the need to use this term, as well as on which processes should fall under this label. The common denominator of such cases consists either in the non-attestation of presumed intermediate stages (Sp. corchotaponero ‘relative to the industry of cork plugs’) or in the non-correspondence between sense and structure of the morphologically complex word (Fr. surnaturel ‘supernatural’).

Intervocalic lenition and word-boundary effects

Diachronica ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Ignacio Hualde
Keyword(s):  
Sound Change ◽  
Word Boundary ◽  
Boundary Effects ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Explanatory Account ◽  
History Of

The lenition of intervocalic consonants is typically phonologized in sound change only within word domains. At first blush, this morphological restriction might seem to contradict the Neogrammarian hypothesis of exclusively phonetic conditioning in sound change. In this paper I examine the weakening of intervocalic voiced stops/affricates in Istanbul Judeo-Spanish. Comparison with Old Spanish shows that in the native lexicon intervocalic lenition has affected only word-internal consonants. Even consonants following a prefix boundary remain unaffected. I argue that, at the time of the expulsion of the Spanish Jews, the language already had the spirantization process, at least in incipient form. This process, which continues to operate across the board in Mainstream Spanish, became restricted at the word level in Judeo-Spanish. This interpretation, consistent with the Neogrammarian hypothesis, is the only one that offers an explanatory account and is supported by the evidence from other similar developments in the history of the Romance languages and with results from recent acoustic studies on incipient or optional lenition processes.

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