Variation in Breton word stress: new speakers and the influence of French

This paper investigates stress patterns in Breton across speakers of different ages and with different linguistic backgrounds. Centuries of contact with French have led to French influence in Breton lexis, phonology and morphosyntax, and Breton's current status as an endangered minority language makes it vulnerable to further change. Additionally, younger ‘new speakers’ of Breton, who have acquired the language through Breton-medium education, are said to transfer features from French into their Breton. Analysis of stress usage shows that older, traditional speakers use stress largely as expected, while there is a greater degree of interspeaker variation among younger, new speakers. These data are used to form a metrical analysis of stress in Breton, taking into account lexical exceptions, loanwords and the variability of younger speakers. Rather than widespread transfer of French stress patterns into Breton, some younger speakers seem to be using two competing stress systems.

The loss of inflection as grammar complication

The loss of inflectional categories is often thought of as a type of simplification. In this paper we present a survey of phenomena involving the reduction of adjective agreement in Scandinavian, using examples from Norwegian, and discuss their diachronic origins, including a new account of the development of indeclinability in adjectives such as kry ‘proud’. These examples each involve lexically restricted non-canonical inflection – syncretism, defectiveness, overdifferentiation and periphrasis – in particular paradigm cells or syntactic environments. They show that the loss of inflection does not necessarily simplify grammar, and in some cases, can increase grammatical complexity by adding lexical exceptions to general rules. This excludes simplification as the motivation, even if it is the eventual result. We argue from these historical developments that speakers are liable to analyse idiosyncratic patterns of inflection as lexically specified, even where more general (but perhaps more abstract) alternatives are possible. Thus speakers do not always operate with a maximally elegant, reductionist approach to inflection classes.

A computational modelof phonotactic acquisition

This paper presents a model that connects phonotactic exceptionality to perceptibility, more specifically to functional load and acoustic detail. I identify two patterns in exceptionality: lexical exceptions and phonotactic vacillation, where the former is restricted to specific lexical items, while the latter affects two contrastive sound categories as a whole. Through the example of Hungarian word-final phonotactics, the Model of Perceptual Categorization associates these two patterns with different functional load and acoustic properties of contrasts, that lead to two categorizational malfunctions. On the one hand, phonotactic vacillation is a result of a frequent failure to categorize ambiguous tokens: low functional load coinciding with little acoustic difference. On the other hand, lexical exceptions are systematic categorizational mistakes brought about by salient categories – in this case distributional generalizations are hindered by interference from mislabeled tokens.

Lessons from the English auxiliary system

The English auxiliary system exhibits many lexical exceptions and subregularities, and considerable dialectal variation, all of which are frequently omitted from generative analyses and discussions. This paper presents a detailed, movement-free account of the English Auxiliary System within Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2010, Michaelis 2011, Boas & Sag 2012) that utilizes techniques of lexicalist and construction-based analysis. The resulting conception of linguistic knowledge involves constraints that license hierarchical structures directly (as in context-free grammar), rather than by appeal to mappings over such structures. This allows English auxiliaries to be modeled as a class of verbs whose behavior is governed by general and class-specific constraints. Central to this account is a novel use of the featureaux, which is set both constructionally and lexically, allowing for a complex interplay between various grammatical constraints that captures a wide range of exceptional patterns, most notably the vexing distribution of unstresseddo, and the fact that Ellipsis can interact with other aspects of the analysis to produce the feeding and blocking relations that are needed to generate the complex facts of EAS. The present approach, superior both descriptively and theoretically to existing transformational approaches, also serves to undermine views of the biology of language and acquisition such as Berwick et al. (2011), which are centered on mappings that manipulate hierarchical phrase structures in a structure-dependent fashion.

Being exceptional is being weak: Tonal exceptions in San Miguel el Grande Mixtec

The assumption of Gradient Symbolic Representations (Smolensky & Goldrick 2016; Rosen 2016) allows a unified account of lexical exceptions to phonological generalizations or processes. It states that phonological elements can have different degrees of presence in an underlying representation, expressed as numerical activities. In this paper, I strengthen the argument for Gradient Symbolic Representations and provide a case study of two seemingly unrelated exceptions in the tonal phonology of San Miguel el Grande Mixtec that receive a unified explanation under the assumption of gradient activity. In addition, I argue for a modification of the original Gradient Symbolic Representation assumption and propose the existence of gradient activity in the output. This assumption allows to predict markedness-driven exceptionality patterns that remain unexplained in the original proposal.

Final devoicing and deletion of /-d/ in Castilian Spanish

In the Spanish of north-western Spain, word-final /-d/ shows a remarkable variety of phonetic outcomes. Its possible realizations include voiced approximants, voiceless fricatives and voiced and voiceless plosives, in addition to the deletion of the segment. Here we examine this complex pattern of allophony in a corpus of conversational speech, focusing on the effect of the following phonological context. The results show that most commonly /-d/ is either deleted or realized as a voiceless fricative. Voiceless fricatives are found in all phrasal contexts, but with significantly higher frequency before pause than before a vowel, which is consistent with the hypothesis of diachronic extension of the devoicing from the former context to the latter. The devoicing of /-d/ is neutralizing. Voiceless fricative realizations of /-d/ do not differ from those of phonemic /-θ/ either in amount of voicing or in duration. This implies that deletion and devoicing represent two alternative patterns of reduction starting from [ð], since phonemic /-θ/ is not subject to deletion. Whereas the deletion of /-d/ has lexical exceptions, its devoicing does not. Among the majority of /d/-final words, for which deletion is possible, the relative frequency with which they undergo deletion vs. devoicing appears to vary substantially depending on the specific lexical item. That is, both position in phrase and lexical identity probabilistically determine the realization of /-d/. In addition to contributing to our understanding of the synchronic and diachronic phonology of word-final obstruents in Spanish, we consider the extent to which these data, showing variable word-final devoicing, may help us understand the historical evolution of the crosslinguistically common phenomenon of systematic word-final devoicing.