Ein korpuslinguistischer Beitrag zu Herkunft und Entwicklung des negativen Indefinitums kein

This article discusses the origin and historical development of the German n-indefinite kein, which is an unusual negator because it does not share the initial n that marks virtually all other negatives in German. Despite the discussion about its origins going back to the nineteenth century, it is still unclear how kein first emerged and out of which other forms it developed. In this paper, new light is shed on an old controversy using new data and modern corpus-linguistic tools, in this case the Referenzkorpus Mittelhochdeutsch (ReM). The article first summarises the current state of research before presenting and analysing the data. In combination with additional evidence, the results show that certain hypotheses that have to this day been treated as accurate are in fact not viable. Subsequently, a solution that combines some of the existing theses and is compatible with the data is presented: Morphological reanalysis and the ensuing back-formation of kein’s predecessor nehein – in combination with a phonologically conditioned sound substitution triggered by a shift of the syllable boundary – in the context of negative concord seems the most likely candidate for an accurate explanation of the emergence and early usage patterns of kein in Middle High German. Incongruent evidence from Swiss German, however, suggests that partially convergent developments ensuing from different indefinite forms have taken place in that variety.

Adjacent Consonants and the Universality of Sonority Sequencing Principle in Dotyali Dialects: Syllable Contact Analysis

This paper presents on all the possible adjacent consonant letters in Dotyali, one of the descendant language of Sanskrit, mainly spoken in Shudoor Paschim Nepal [sʊdʊrə-pəssɪmə] (Far-western) and compares the results of their phonological changes in seven local contemporary speech (dialects)：Doteli，Dadeldhuri，Bajhangi，Achhami，Baitadeli，Darchuli and Bajureli. Based on the corpus data from the field survey conducted in between July-September 2017 on a list of 1000 frequently used Dotyali words, this paper comes with a conclusion that even the onset clusters with rising sonority profile (except glides) are broken up by vowel epenthesis or simplify the clusters by deletion. It is revealed that dialects, except from the Achhami and Bajureli, the consonants with different degree of sonority across the syllable boundary tend to be changed due to syllable contact to meet Sonority hierchy, but the sonority distance between two consonants (coda and onset consonants) varies, therefore phonological changes like assimilation, dissimilation, desonorization, contact anaptyxis, contact methasis etc. goes differently. The phonological changes in Bajureli occurs maily due to other separate independent constraints.

Rules for Orthographic Word Parsing of the Philippines' Cebuano-Visayan Language Using Context-Free Grammars

Syllabication is essential in the preprocessing stage of speech systems. In the context of the Philippines' Cebuano-Visayan language's syllabication rules, the existing rules do not include hyphenated words although the hyphen defines the syllable boundary in a word. Hence, this study created grammar rules for hyphenated words which include sequences of a hyphen between vowel-consonant, consonant-consonant, vowel-vowel, and consonant-vowel. The test was done for the enhanced grammar rules for Cebuano-Visayan syllabication with 1,465 representative hyphenated and non-hyphenated words of varying lengths. The result further implies that the syllabication analysis for hyphenated words showed that hyphens improve the naturalness and intelligibility in the utterance of the words, thereby enhancing the understanding and comprehension of the Cebuano-Visayan discourse.

Blending in Morphology

Blending is a type of word formation in which two or more words are merged into one so that the blended constituents are either clipped, or partially overlap. An example of a typical blend is brunch, in which the beginning of the word breakfast is joined with the ending of the word lunch. In many cases such as motel (motor + hotel) or blizzaster (blizzard + disaster) the constituents of a blend overlap at segments that are phonologically or graphically identical. In some blends, both constituents retain their form as a result of overlap, for example, stoption (stop + option). These examples illustrate only a handful of the variety of forms blends may take; more exotic examples include formations like Thankshallowistmas (Thanksgiving + Halloween + Christmas). The visual and audial amalgamation in blends is reflected on the semantic level. It is common to form blends meaning a combination or a product of two objects or phenomena, such as an animal breed (e.g., zorse, a breed of zebra and horse), an interlanguage variety (e.g., franglais, which is a French blend of français and anglais meaning a mixture of French and English languages), or other type of mix (e.g., a shress is a type of clothes having features of both a shirt and a dress). Blending as a word formation process can be regarded as a subtype of compounding because, like compounds, blends are formed of two (or sometimes more) content words and semantically either are hyponyms of one of their constituents, or exhibit some kind of paradigmatic relationships between the constituents. In contrast to compounds, however, the formation of blends is restricted by a number of phonological constraints given that the resulting formation is a single word. In particular, blends tend to be of the same length as the longest of their constituent words, and to preserve the main stress of one of their constituents. Certain regularities are also observed in terms of ordering of the words in a blend (e.g., shorter first, more frequent first), and in the position of the switch point, that is, where one blended word is cut off and switched to another (typically at the syllable boundary or at the onset/rime boundary). The regularities of blend formation can be related to the recognizability of the blended words.

Syllabification of Bi-Consonantal Clusters Between Vowels in Albanian

Syllabification is one of the most complex issues in Albanian phonetics. An extensive treatment of the topic was made by Dodi (2004), who, thanks to a thorough acquaintance with the existing literature on the area, also clearly states the drawbacks of the main theories of the syllable, based on material from the Albanian language. However, despite the huge research carried out and the important results achieved, the positions of linguists on syllabification remain different. One reason for this is that linguistic literature lacks an established definition of the syllable as a linguistic unit. In the present research on syllabification, we support some of the existing rules by bringing new arguments and making some additions in order to make them more convincing, with a view to improving and simplifying their practical application. We focus on syllable boundary when there are two consonants between vowels, based on the Sonority Sequencing Principle, on the Syllable Contact Law, the Dispersion Principle, and the Maximum Onset Principle.

THE ROLE OF DISTINCTIVE FEATURES IN THE STRUCTURE OF THE SYLLABLE. A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH AND SLOVAK

The placement of the syllable boundary in consonant clusters occurring word-medially is a perennial problem in phonological theory. The comprehension of the syllable as the “smallest binding unit of language” (Pauliny 1979: 101), as the unit necessary for the understanding of the phonological structure of the language, enables us to determine the boundaries of syllables on the basis of contrasts between the neighbouring phonemes in the syllable. The degree of contrast depends on the distinctive features of the given phonemes. To evaluate this approach, distinctive features of phonemes from two different languages – English and Slovak – were delimited according to two distinctive features theories – Feature Geometry and synthetic phonological theory. The sample analysis of the English and the Slovak words with word-medial consonant clusters indicates the validity of this approach for the demarcation of the syllable boundary in polysyllabic words.

Perceptually Based Constraints and Metathesis: Evidence from Artificial Grammar

The present paper explores the role of sonority and other perceptual constraints in governing syllable structure constraints. One of the most important issues in phonology today is the formalization of the phonetic grounding of markedness constraints (Hayes and Steriade 2004). Sonority constraints have been particularly controversial because there is no formalized definition of sonority, but rather several different contributing factors, such as intensity, constriction and formant transitions, that all vary depending on context (Henke, Kaisse, and Wright 2012; Wright 2004). This paper makes use of an artificial grammar learning paradigm, whereby adult English speakers were exposed to a consonant-consonant metathesis pattern that either improved sonority at a syllable boundary, or worsened sonority at a syllable boundary. Learners did not show generalization in line with sonority-based syllable contact laws, but instead showed generalization in accordance with avoidance of a voiced obstruent in coda position, thus supporting a theory of sonority and syllable contact that makes use of the interaction of perceptual cues, rather than a strict, abstract sonority hierarchy.

Accent in Japanese Phonology

The word accent system of Tokyo Japanese might look quite complex with a number of accent patterns and rules. However, recent research has shown that it is not as complex as has been assumed if one incorporates the notion of markedness into the analysis: nouns have only two productive accent patterns, the antepenultimate and the unaccented pattern, and different accent rules can be generalized if one focuses on these two productive accent patterns. The word accent system raises some new interesting issues. One of them concerns the fact that a majority of nouns are ‘unaccented,’ that is, they are pronounced with a rather flat pitch pattern, apparently violating the principle of obligatoriness. A careful analysis of noun accentuation reveals that this strange accent pattern occurs in some linguistically predictable structures. In morphologically simplex nouns, it typically tends to emerge in four-mora nouns ending in a sequence of light syllables. In compound nouns, on the other hand, it emerges due to multiple factors, such as compound-final deaccenting morphemes, deaccenting pseudo-morphemes, and some types of prosodic configurations. Japanese pitch accent exhibits an interesting aspect in its interactions with other phonological and linguistic structures. For example, the accent of compound nouns is closely related with rendaku, or sequential voicing; the choice between the accented and unaccented patterns in certain types of compound nouns correlates with the presence or absence of the sequential voicing. Moreover, whether the compound accent rule applies to a certain compound depends on its internal morphosyntactic configuration as well as its meaning; alternatively, the compound accent rule is blocked in certain types of morphosyntactic and semantic structures. Finally, careful analysis of word accent sheds new light on the syllable structure of the language, notably on two interrelated questions about diphthong-hood and super-heavy syllables. It provides crucial insight into ‘diphthongs,’ or the question of which vowel sequence constitutes a diphthong, against a vowel sequence across a syllable boundary. It also presents new evidence against trimoraic syllables in the language.