Areal patterns and colexifications of colour terms in the languages of Africa

Of all the semantic domains, colour terms have attracted the largest amount of attention, notably from a typological point of view. However, there is much more to be discovered. A search of the cross-linguistic lexical database of African languages (RefLex) reveals several previously undetected areal colexification patterns and shared lexico-constructional patterns in a genetically balanced sample of 401 languages. In this paper, we illustrate several areal characteristics of colour terms: (i) the spread of an areal feature due to a common extra-linguistic setting (locust bean – Parkia biglobosa – as the lexical source of yellow); (ii) two convergence phenomena, one based on a shared lexico-constructional pattern including a term for water, and one based on shared colexifications (red and ripe vs. green and unripe); and (iii) an areal pattern of lexical diffusion of colour ideophones, a category which has thus far been considered difficult to borrow.

Lexical diffusion in the making: the lengthening of Middle English /a/ during the eighteenth century and across the diasystem of English

A long /aː/ in pre-fricative and pre-nasal contexts in words such as fast, answer or after is one of the most distinctive phonological features of British RP and, to a certain extent, of Southern Hemisphere varieties of English (Trudgill 2010). The lengthening of /a/ has been particularly gaining ground from the eighteenth century onwards (Beal 1999; Jones 2006). The pronouncing dictionaries published between the eighteenth century and the present day allow us to trace its lexical diffusion (Labov 1994) across the whole lexicon. Drawing on the statistics of the ARCHER corpus, the lexical sets of the ECEP database, the full electronic edition of Walker's dictionary (1791), Wells’ Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (2008) and the Macquarie Dictionary (2015), this article examines the role played by the phonetic environment, word frequency, phonetic analogy and isolated lead words like draught or master in the spread of the lengthening of /a/. The results show that word frequency per se has no clear effect on /a/ lengthening in either pre-fricative or pre-nasal environments in eighteenth-century sources. The article also offers a possible relative chronology of the spread of that phenomenon to each phonetic environment within the bath set.

/dˤ/-Variation in Saudi Newscasting and Phonological Theory

In his analysis of /dˤ/-variation in Saudi Arabian newscasting, Al-Tamimi (2020) finds unpredicatble variability between the standard variant [dˤ] and the non-standard variant [ðˤ] in different in-words positions, in different phonetic environments, and in semantically ‘content’ and suprasegmentally ‘stressed’ lexical itmes assumed to favor the standard variant. He even finds in many of these lexical items an unusual realizational flucatuation between the two variants. The present exploratory and ‘theory-testing’ study aims to find a reasonable account for these findings through examining the explanatory adequacy of a number of available phonological theories, notions, models and proposals that have made different attempts to accommodate variation, and this includes Coexistent Phonemic Systems, Standard Generative Phonology, Lexical Diffusion, Variable Rules, Poly-Lectal Grammar, Articulatory Phonology, different versions of the Optimality Theory, in addition to the Multiple-Trace-Model, as represented by Al-Tamimi’s (2005) Multiple-Trace-Based Proposal. The study reveals the strengths and weaknesses of these theories in embracing the variability in the data, and concludes that the Multiple-Trace-Based Proposal can relatively offer the best insight as its allows variation to be directly encoded in the underlying representations of lexical items, a status strictly prohibited by the rest of the theories that adopt invariant lexical representations in consonance with the ‘Homogeneity Doctrine’.

Quantitative Studies of the Use of Negative (Dependent) Expressions

Many recent quantitative studies examine the use of English negative-dependent expressions, focusing on variation between no-negation and not-negation. Tottie, Varela-Perez, Wallage, Childs, Burnett et al. identify several constraints on this variation–notably verb-type and discourse-function—which, in turn, inform the structural analysis of Present-day English negative words and negative clauses. Explaining its origins, Tottie hypothesizes that variation between no-negation and not-negation is a consequence of the ongoing lexical diffusion of not. However, statistical analyses of diachronic corpus data provide evidence against this hypothesis. They indicate that variation between no-negation and not-negation is stable and historically persistent from the sixteenth century to the Present-day, suggesting that it is established during Middle English (eleventh to fifteenth centuries) through the interaction of two independent changes to the syntax of negation—the Jespersen Cycle and the quantifier cycle.

Interplay of Phonological, Morphological, and Lexical Variation: Adjectives in Japanese Dialects

This paper examines the interplay of phonological, morphological, and lexical variation focusing on adjectives in Japanese dialects. Previous studies of adjectives in the Niigata dialects of the Japanese language analyzed the ongoing changes in dialectal variation amongst the young generation of Japanese. In this paper, the data derived from the geolinguistic survey and dialect dictionaries are used to verify the estimated changes in phonological, morphological, and lexical variation. The variation of adjectives is examined by classifying forms with regard to the distinction between standard/dialectal forms. The phonological types of adjectives played a role in the interpretation of the phonological variation and change. Most changes of phonological types are phonologically explained but include change by analogy. The lexical variation is intertwined with phonological variation and morphological variation. The morphological distributions which vary according to the conjugation form are one example of lexical diffusion.

The trap–bath split in Bristol English

The pronunciation of the bath vowel is a salient feature of English varieties of the southwest of England, yet neither the status of the trap–bath split in traditional dialects nor ongoing change today is well understood. After reviewing the existing literature, we investigate the quality and length of low unrounded vowels in Bristol English on the basis of sociolinguistic interviews with twenty-five speakers. The picture suggested by these data is complex: there is evidence for a traditional length-only trap–bath split, for a length and backness split diffusing from the east and for a merger diffusing from the north. Some of these changes involve lexical diffusion, especially with loanwords and other distinctive lexical groups. Overall, the rich and contradictory data speak to the contested sociolinguistic status of these variables and to the need to examine individual patterns of variation closely to gain a full understanding of them.

Constraints on the use of the plural morpheme men in spoken Mandarin

This study returns to the oft-debated question of grammatical number and plurality in Modern Standard Chinese and attempts to shed new light on the constraints operating on the plural marker men by analysing its use in a corpus of half a million characters of spoken data. Data from the present research indicate that the plural morpheme men is less sensitive than previously assumed to a number of constraints outlined in the standard literature, including structural constraints involving NPs with quantifiers and explicit number expressions. At the same time, it is also more sensitive to a range of other factors that have hitherto been largely overlooked, including parallelism, the length of NP modifiers and lexical diffusion. The findings also suggest that the morpheme men is not used only to indicate plurality and collectivity but may have a number of other roles as well, such as functioning like a diminutive suffix and contributing to the organization of discourse and information structure.