On Lexical Phonology of Zubairi Arabic

As its name implies, Lexical Phonology (LP) is a two-sided discipline which is very much pervasive and of a priority for particular interest. It is basically a matter of the systematic correlation of both morphology and phonology as a preliminary to screening endless items and senses. Once postulated and covered with its linguistically theoretical frames, LP has proved attractive, useful and handful in that it turns up so often in such topics as lexical items with their phonological configurations and words with their stratum-based designs. The present paper is a painstaking scrutiny of how LP is thoroughly worked out to demarcate the lexical and phonological boundaries of Zubairi Arabic lexical items with a special reference to the linguistic behavior of affix attachments. It is no doubt a massive task – it is armed with such and such amount of systematization and provided with certain 'harmless looking terms and expressions that are frequently used. In attempt to focus on this point of interaction between phonology and morphology, the paper adopts the line of reasoning that is primarily based on a tabulated description and analysis of examples so as to serve the purposes of setting some comparisons, showing certain contrasts or governing particular rules of applications as far as Zubairi words and expressions are concerned. Among many results the paper has reached is evidently the one that the structure of Zubairi Arabic lexical items is the empirical "container" in which both phonological and morphological lines of representation are sometimes crossed very sharply or sometimes paralleled very endlessly whereby their blurriness may be relative and variable.

Against the Law of Three Consonants in French: Evidence from Judgment Data

Grammont's Law of Three Consonants (LTC) states that French schwa is obligatorily pronounced in any CC_C sequence to avoid three-consonant clusters. Although schwa presence has been shown to be sensitive not only to cluster size but also to the nature of consonants in post-lexical phonology, the LTC is still considered as accurate to describe schwa-zero alternations in lexical phonology. The paper uses judgment data from French speakers in France and Switzerland to compare the behavior of schwa in derived words (lexical phonology) and inflected words (post-lexical phonology). The results show that schwa-zero alternations are conditioned not only by cluster size but also by cluster type in lexical phonology. Moreover, the same phonotactic asymmetries among consonant clusters are found in lexical and post-lexical phonologies. The data therefore support a weaker version of the lexical-phonology hypothesis than what is usually assumed for French. Lexical and post-lexical phonologies do not require different phonotactic constraints but only different weights for the same constraints.

EXPRESS: The role of orthographic cues to stress in Italian visual word recognition

In the present study stress diacritics were used to investigate the processing of stress information in lexical decision. We ran two experiments in Italian, a language in which stress position is not predictable by rule and only final stress – i.e., the less common pattern – is orthographically marked with a diacritic. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision task, two factors were manipulated: The stress pattern of words – antepenultimate (non dominant) and penultimate (dominant) – and the presence/absence of the diacritics, signalling the stress position. Participants were faster to categorize stimuli as words when they bear dominant than non dominant stress. However, the advantage disappeared when the diacritic was used. In Experiment 2, a same-different verification task was used in which participants had to decide if a referent word and a target were same (carota-CAROTA, /ka'rɔta/; tavolo-TAVOLO, /'tavolo/) or different. We compared two conditions requiring a "different" response, in which referent and target with dominant and non dominant stress were congruent (caròta-CAROTA; tàvolo-TAVOLO) or incongruent (càrota-CAROTA; tavòlo-TAVOLO) with the word’s stress. For words with dominant stress, “different” responses were faster in the incongruent condition than the congruent condition. This congruency effect was not observed for words with non-dominant stress pattern. Overall, the data suggest that stress information is based on lexical phonology, and the stress dominance effect has a lexical base in word recognition.

Do morphophonological exchange rules exist? A reply to DiCanio et al. (2020)

DiCanio et al. (2020) (this volume) argue that San Martín Itunyoso Triqui has a morphophonological exchange (also called ‘polarity’), where morphemes are realized by switching feature values: e.g. the bare root [anĩɦ] ‘get dirty’ is realized as [anĩː] in the 1s, while the root [aniː] ‘stop’ is 1s [anĩɦ]. In this Reply, I seek to clarify how the descriptive use of ‘exchange’ relates to and differs from its meaning in phonological theories. I also show that the issue of whether exchanges exist is highly theory-dependent. For SPE, Lexical Phonology and Morphology, and single-level parallelist OT with opacity mechanisms, the IT forms do not provide evidence for exchange mechanisms. In contrast, a version of OT that lacks opacity mechanisms probably cannot generate the IT forms without an exchange mechanism. Issues facing the analyst, such as how to prove that exchanges exist, and which apparent exchanges one should expect to observe, are also discussed.

Morphology and Metrical Structure

Work on the relationship between morphology and metrical structure has mainly addressed three questions: 1. How does morphological constituent structure map onto prosodic constituent structure, i.e., the structure that is responsible for metrical organization? 2. What are the reflexes of morphological relations between complex words and their bases in metrical structure? 3. How variable or categorical are metrical alternations? The focus in the work specified in question 1 has been on establishing prosodic constituency with supported evidence from morphological constituency. Pertinent prosodic constituents are the prosodic (or phonological) word, the metrical foot, the syllable, and the mora (Selkirk, 1980). For example, the phonological behavior of certain affixes has been used to argue that they are word-internal prosodic words, which thus means that prosodic words may be recursive structures (e.g., Aronoff & Sridhar, 1987). Similarly, the shape of truncated words has been used as evidence for the shape of the metrical foot (cf., e.g., Alber & Arndt-Lappe, 2012). Question 2 considers morphologically conditioned metrical alternations. Stress alternations have received particular attention. Affixation processes differ in whether or not they exhibit stress alternations. Affixes that trigger stress alternations are commonly referred to as 'stress-shifting' affixes, those that do not are referred to as 'stress-preserving' affixes. The fact that morphological categories differ in their stress behavior has figured prominently in theoretical debates about the phonology-morphology interface, in particular between accounts that assume a stratal architecture with interleaving phonology-morphology modules (such as lexical phonology, esp. Kiparsky, 1982, 1985) and those that assume that morphological categories come with their own phonologies (e.g., Inkelas, Orgun, & Zoll, 1997; Inkelas & Zoll, 2007; Orgun, 1996). Question 3 looks at metrical variation and its relation to the processing of morphologically complex words. There is a growing body of recent empirical work showing that some metrical alternations seem variable (e.g., Collie, 2008; Dabouis, 2019). This means that different stress patterns occur within a single morphological category. Theoretical explanations of the phenomenon vary depending on the framework adopted. However, what unites pertinent research seems to be that the variation is codetermined by measures that are usually associated with lexical storage. These are semantic transparency, productivity, and measures of lexical frequency.

Stratal phonology and Russian morphophonology

This paper analyses a fragment of the morphophonological grammar of Russian, namely the so-called e ~ ’о alternation, within a Lexical Phonology-style stratal model. The aim is to demonstrate that the rule shows a range of properties usually associated with stem-level phonology. Thus, on the one hand, Russian data provides further support for a stratal model of morphophonology, and on the other hand stratal models appear to be a productive approach to Russian morphophonological alternations that explicitly links morphophonology with both phonological patterns and the morphological and semantic structure of Russian words.

Morphologically conditioned phonological alternations

This chapter asks how affixes can affect the phonology of their stems, as in harmony/ harmonic/harmonious. Within the Parallel Architecture, phonology is an algebraic form of representation, while phonetic representation is analog in character. Their relation is negotiated by an interface that relates phonological segments and sequences to positions and trajectories in phonetic space. In these terms, the chapter explores aspiration, final devoicing, vowel shift and vowel reduction, affixes like -ity and -ious that manipulate the phonology of their bases, and affixes that can blend with their bases, for instance flattery (= flatter+ery). Again the formal machinery of sister schemas plays an important role in the account, taking over the work done in other theories by derivation (as in SPE and Lexical Phonology) and constraint ranking (as in Optimality Theory)

Compensatory Lengthening in OT and DOT: Loss of Dorsal Fricatives in Middle or Early Modern English

The loss of dorsal fricatives in English held significant consequences for the adjacent tautosyllabic vowels, which underwent Compensatory Lengthening in order to preserve a syllable weight. While the process appears to be regular in descriptive terms, its evaluation handled within standard Optimality Theory highlights the ineffectiveness of the framework to parse both the segment deletion and two weight-related processes: Weight- by-Position and vowel lengthening due to mora preservation. As Optimality Theory has failed to analyse the data in a compelling manner, the introduction of derivation, benefitting from the legacy of Lexical Phonology, seems inevitable. The working solution is provided by Derivational Optimality Theory, which assumes a restrictive use of intermediate stages throughout the evaluation.

Phonetic effects of morphology and context: Modeling the duration of word-final S in English with naïve discriminative learning

Recent research on the acoustic realization of affixes has revealed differences between phonologically homophonous affixes, e.g. the different kinds of final [s] and [z] in English (Plag, Homann & Kunter 2017, Zimmermann 2016a). Such results are unexpected and unaccounted for in widely accepted post-Bloomfieldian item-and-arrangement models (Hockett 1954), which separate lexical and post-lexical phonology, and in models which interpret phonetic effects as consequences of different prosodic structure. This paper demonstrates that the differences in duration of English final S as a function of the morphological function it expresses (non-morphemic, plural, third person singular, genitive, genitive plural, cliticizedhas, and cliticizedis) can be approximated by considering the support for these morphological functions from the words’ sublexical and collocational properties. We estimated this support using naïve discriminative learning and replicated previous results for English vowels (Tucker, Sims & Baayen 2019), indicating that segment duration is lengthened under higher functional certainty but shortened under functional uncertainty. We discuss the implications of these results, obtained with a wide learning network that eschews representations for morphemes and exponents, for models in theoretical morphology as well as for models of lexical processing.