An Argument for Phonological Stress in French: the syntagm over contrast

It is standardly assumed that French does not have word-stress, rather it has phrase-level prominence. I will advance a number of arguments, many of which have appeared already in the literature, that cumulatively suggest that French roots are characterized by phonological prominence, even if this is non-contrastive. By prominence, I mean a syntagmatically distributed strength that has all the phonological characteristics of stress in other Romance languages. I will remain agnostic about the nature of that stress, eschewing the lively debate about whether French has feet, and if so what type, and at what level. The structure of the argument is as follows. French demonstrably has phonological word-final strength but one wonders what the source of this strength is. Positionally, the initial position is strong and, independently of cases where it is reinforced by other factors, the final position is weak. I will argue, based on parallels with other Romance languages, that French word-final strength derives from root-final phonological stress. The broader significance of this conclusion is that syntagmatic properties are enough to motivate underlying forms, even in the absence of paradigmatic contrasts (minimal pairs).

A Gradient Harmonic Grammar Account of Nasals in Extended Phonological Words

The article aims at contributing to the long-standing research on the prosodic organization of linguistic elements and the criteria used for identifying prosodic structures. Our focus is on final coronal nasals in function words in Greek and the variability in their patterns of realization before lexical words. Certain nasals coalesce before stops and delete before fricatives, whereas others do not. We propose that this split in the behavior of nasals does not pertain to item-specific prosody because the relevant strings are uniformly prosodified into an extended phonological word (Itô & Mester 2007, 2009). It rather stems from the contrastive activity level of nasals in underlying forms in the spirit of Smolensky & Goldrick’s (2016) Gradient Symbolic Representations; nasals with lower activity coalesce and delete in the respective phonological environments, whereas those with higher activity do not. We show that the proposed analysis captures certain gradient effects that alternative analyses cannot account for.

What is a word in Brokpa?

This paper investigates the structure of phonological word and grammatical word in Brokpa, a Tibeto-Burman (Trans-Himalayan) language of Bhutan. Defining features of a phonological word include stress, tone, and segmental properties. A grammatical word is defined based on conventionalized coherence and meaning, fixed order of morphemes, and its behaviour in relation to derivational and inflectional marking. Grammatical and phonological words in Brokpa coincide in most instances. Typical mismatches include words involving non-cohering compounds and non-cohering reduplication. A formal distinction between phonological and grammatical word is the key to our understanding of the interactions between different parts of grammar in Brokpa, and help resolve potential ambiguities of the term “word” in this language.

The Phonology of Compounds

A number of recent developments in phonological theory, beginning with The Sound Pattern of English, are particularly relevant to the phonology of compounds. They address both the phonological phenomena that apply to compound words and the phonological structures that are required as the domains of these phenomena: segmental and nonsegmental phenomena that operate within each member of a compound separately, as well as at the juncture between the members of compounds and throughout compounds as a whole. In all cases, what is crucial for the operation of the phonological phenomena of compounds is phonological structure, in terms of constituents of the Prosodic Hierarchy, as opposed to morphosyntactic structure. Specifically, only two phonological constituents are required, the Phonological Word, which provides the domain for phenomena that apply to the individual members of compounds and at their junctures, and a larger constituent that groups the members of compounds together. The nature of the latter is somewhat controversial, the main issue being whether or not there is a constituent in the Prosodic Hierarchy between the Phonological Word and the Phonological Phrase. When present, this constituent, the Composite Group (revised from the original Clitic Group), includes the members of compounds, as well as “stray” elements such as clitics and “Level 2” affixes. In its absence, compounds, and often the same “stray” elements, are analyzed as a type of Recursive Phonological Word, although crucially, the combinations of such element do not exhibit the same properties as the basic Phonological Word.

L2 acquisition of high vowel deletion in Quebec French

In languages with lexical stress, stress is computed in the phonological word (PWd) and realized in the foot. In some of these languages, feet are constructed iteratively, yielding multiple stressed syllables in a PWd. English has this profile. In French, by contrast, the only position of obligatory prominence is the right-edge of the phonological phrase (PPh), regardless of how many lexical words it contains (Dell 1984). This has led some to analyze French "stress" as intonational prominence and French, in contrast to most languages, as foot-less (Jun & Fougeron 2000). In earlier work, we argued that high vowel deletion (HVD) motivates iterative iambic footing in Quebec French (QF), although the typical signatures of word-level stress are absent. In this paper, we examine the L2 acquisition of HVD and the prosodic constraints that govern it. We show that L2ers can acquire subtle aspects of the phonology of a second language, even at intermediate levels of proficiency.

EXPRESS: Mediated Phonological-Semantic Priming in Spoken Word Production: Evidence for Cascaded Processing from Picture-Word Interference

While there is consensus regarding a two-step architecture involving lexical-conceptual and phonological word form levels of processing, accounts of how activation spreads between them (e.g. in a serial, cascaded, or interactive fashion) remain contentious. In addition, production models differ with respect to whether selection occurs at lexical or post-lexical levels. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether mediated phonological-semantic relations (e.g., drip is phonologically related to drill that is semantically related to hammer) influence production in adults as predicted by models implementing cascaded processing and feedback between levels. Two experiments using the Picture-Word Interference (PWI) paradigm were conducted using auditory (Exp. 1) and written (Exp. 2) distractors. We hypothesised that a mediated semantic interference effect would be observable in the former with the involvement of both spoken word production and recognition, and in the latter if lexical representations are shared between written and spoken words in English, as assumed by some production accounts. Further, we hypothesised a mediated semantic interference effect would be inconsistent with a post-lexical selection account as the distractors do not constitute a relevant response for the target picture (e.g., drip-HAMMER). We observed mediated semantic interference only from auditory distractors, while observing the standard semantic interference effect from both auditory and written distractors. The current findings represent the first chronometric evidence involving spoken word production and recognition in support of cascaded processing during lexical retrieval in adults and present a significant challenge for the post-lexical selection account.

Recursos educativos digitais e o ensino/aprendizagem da gramática

This paper presents two digital educational resources (DER), which aim at promoting the development of metalinguistic competence of students attending the 3rd grade of Primary School (age 8/9). The digital resource Laboratório Gramatical Digital: A Força das Sílabas [Digital Grammar Lab: The strength of syllables] promotes the development of metaphonological competence of students on the phonological word stress in European Portuguese. It adopts a discovery-learning approach through the implementation of a grammar laboratory (‘Grammar Lab’). The digital resource Cozinhar a Aprender [Cooking to Learn] offers a learning experience where users build their own knowledge on a specific textual genre (recipe) through the analysis of concrete examples (or models) of this textual genre. The didactic approach implemented draws upon the notion of text genre and the model of didactic sequence. These two DER aim to contribute to a paradigm shift from traditional practices towards more active and student-centered ones.

Word in Hmong

Hmong (Hmong-Mien; Laos and diaspora) possesses categories of both phonological word and grammatical word. Phonological words exhibit a prosodic prominence in certain pragmatic situations combined with a lack of pauses within the word, and a minimal consonant-vowel-tone structure of a syllable serves as a minor third criterion. Grammatical words exhibit grammatical cohesion of two types—isolability, where words can appear alone in their domain, and the absence of separability, where components of a word cannot be separated—and serve as the domain for reduplication and lexical tone melody alternations. Given a category of grammatical wordhood, affixes and compounds can be recognized in Hmong, and coordinate compounds and four-syllable elaborate expressions can be distinguished as set expressions and templatic constructions, respectively. Hmong attests mismatches between phonological and grammatical word, which include the presence of clitics and cliticization in casual speech at a moderate rate of speed, and varying arrangements of grammatical words in four-syllable elaborate expressions.

The phonological and grammatical status of Murui ‘word’

Different sorts of phonological and grammatical criteria can be used to identify wordhood in Murui, a Witotoan language from Northwest Amazonia. A phonological word is determined on entirely phonological principles. Its key indicators include prosody (stress) and segmental phonology (vowel length). A phonological word is further produced by applying relevant phonological processes within it and not across its word boundaries. The further criterion is moraicity which requires that the minimal phonological word contains at least two moras. A grammatical word, determined entirely on grammatical principles, consists of one lexical root to which morphological processes (affixation, cliticization, and reduplication) are applied. The components of a grammatical word are cohesive and occur in a relatively fixed order. Although Murui grammatical and phonological words mostly coincide, the ‘mismatches’ include nominal compounds (that is, one phonological word consisting of two grammatical words), verbal root reduplication (one grammatical but two phonological words), and clitics.

Words within words

This chapter discusses the nature of ‘phonological word’ and ‘grammatical word’ in three disparate languages (on each of which the author has done extensive fieldwork and published a comprehensive description), examining the ways in which one type of word may be included within another type. In Yidiñ, an Australian language, a grammatical word may consist of a whole number of phonological words. Jarawara—from the small Arawá family in the Amazonian jungle of Brazil—also has this feature and in addition allows a phonological word to consist of a whole number of grammatical words. Finally, the Austronesian language Fijian shows both these and also has a grammatical word consisting of one and a bit phonological words (and thus, necessarily, a phonological word consisting of one and a bit grammatical words).