San’ani Arabic Stress in Harmonic Serialism

The word stress system in San’ani Arabic exhibits patterns of stress placement that associate some level of prominence with syllables with long vowels and syllables that end in the left-leg of a geminate. The fact that such syllables always succeed in attracting stress away from other non-final CVC syllables, even beyond the final trisyllabic window, clearly indicates the role that underlying moraicity plays in the stress algorithm. The proposed account, offered in this paper for the word stress system in San’ani, is couched in Harmonic Serialism, as a serial version of Optimality Theory. Key to the analyses presented is the assumption of gradual prosodification. The distinction drawn between faithful and unfaithful prosodic operations allows for applying some in a parallel fashion, but confines others to serialism. Central to the analysis, as well, is the exceptional case of final stress, which is mainly attributed to the intrinsic prominence of syllables with underlying bimoraic sequences.

Lexical analyses of the function and phonology of Papuan Malay word stress

The existence of word stress in Indonesian languages has been controversial. Recent acoustic analyses of Papuan Malay suggest that this language has word stress, counter to other studies and unlike closely related languages. The current study further investigates Papuan Malay by means of lexical (non-acoustic) analyses of two different aspects of word stress. In particular, this paper reports two distribution analyses of a word corpus, 1) investigating the extent to which stress patterns may help word recognition and 2) exploring the phonological factors that predict the distribution of stress patterns. The facilitating role of stress patterns in word recognition was investigated in a lexical analysis of word embeddings. The results show that Papuan Malay word stress (potentially) helps to disambiguate words. As for stress predictors, a random forest analysis investigated the effect of multiple morpho-phonological factors on stress placement. It was found that the mid vowels /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ play a central role in stress placement, refining the conclusions of previous work that mainly focused on /ɛ/. The current study confirms that non-acoustic research on stress can complement acoustic research in important ways. Crucially, the combined findings on stress in Papuan Malay so far give rise to an integrated perspective to word stress, in which phonetic, phonological and cognitive factors are considered.

Overlapping subjunctive forms in Gallo- and Ibero-Romance verb paradigms

In several varieties of Catalan, Valencian and Occitan, inflectional exponents originating in the imperfect subjunctive (reflex of Latin pluperfect subjunctive) are analogically extended into the first and second person plural present subjunctive forms, resulting in syncretism between present and imperfect subjunctive forms for the relevant persons. The scope and directionality of such extensions are remarkably consistent, and are indicative of a change driven by the structure of the inflectional paradigm in the relevant varieties. A significant consequence of this development, which fits into a general Romance tendency for analogical remodelling of first and second person plural forms, is alignment between previously overlapping distributions of stem allomorphs and stress placement, and thus greater predictability of inflected forms.

Difficulties Faced by Iraqi Second Year Students in Learning Weak Forms

The current study aims at investigating difficulties encountered by Iraqi second year students in learning weak forms .Thus, the descriptive analytical approach has been adopted as well as three tools have been used for gathering data relating to the study, particularly a questionnaire production and recognition tests to second Year students of English at university of Baghdad-college of languages, department of English. The Iraqi second year students have difficulty in Learn weak forms due to the fact of intelligibility, syllables, and stress .Besides, the undergraduates students are unable to determine the number of syllables and they are unable to distinguish between the various words classes. Finally ,they lack stress placement and vowels reduction.

Sonority-driven stress and vowel reduction in Uyghur

A number of authors have argued that sonority differences among vowels may interact with weight-sensitive stress placement (e.g. Kenstowicz 1994, 1997; de Lacy 2006). In previous work on sonority-sensitivity, variable stress placement has usually been assumed. In this paper, I examine the role of sonority in Uyghur, a language with fixed stress. I argue that sonority is encoded as a weight distinction in the language, which drives asymmetric lengthening of word-final high vowels. I demonstrate that a mora-based analysis also offers insight into medial vowel raising in the language, and sketch out an Optimality theoretic account of the data. Findings from this study support the recent claim made by Shih & de Lacy (2019) that sonority differences are only indirectly available to the grammar in the form of weight distinctions.

Ellipsis as obliteration: Evidence from Bengali negative allomorphy

Bengali has two negative markers: ni with perfects, and na everywhere else. When a perfect is elided, however, only the elsewhere form is permissible. Hence, in Bengali, ellipsis bleeds allomorphy. Ellipsis in Bengali is analysed as PF deletion, since differential object marking and quirky case are preserved out of ellipsis sites. Given these facts, this paper argues that in a Distributed Morphology framework, ellipsis in Bengali is implemented as terminal obliteration prior to Vocabulary Insertion. This contrasts with Irish, where it appears stress placement bleeds ellipsis. Some implications for the timing of ellipsis cross-linguistically are discussed.

Lexical stress variation and rhythmic alternation in Russian

Our paper investigates lexical stress placement variation in Modern Standard Russian past tense verbal forms. This kind of variation has arisen due to complex interactions of various processes in the development of Russian and its present-day state is said (often rather impressionistically) to be conditioned by intra-speaker sociolinguistic factors. However, cases of inter-speaker variation can also be observed. We put forward a proposal that stress placement in forms with variable stress is influenced by the rhythmic pattern of immediate linear context. To support this, we report on a pilot experiment that shows a preference towards alternating rhythm in a sequence consisting of a past tense verbal form of a transitive verb and its direct object, thus conforming to the fundamental principle of rhythmic alternation. The results also raise some questions about the phonology of stress and stress variation in Russian and beyond.