Grammaticalization and Parametric Variation

Autors:

Montserrat Batllori, Maria-Lluïsa Hernanz, Carme Picallo, and Francesc Roca

Títol:

Grammaticalization and Parametric Variation

Editorial: Oxford University Press
Data de publicació: 2005
Pàgines: 332
ISBN13: 9780199272129

Més informació

In this book the methods and theories of formal syntax are focussed on grammatical variation and change.
The book opens with a detailed introduction to the ideas and techniques deployed in the book and the phenomena and issues on which they are brought to bear. Seventeen chapters follow, divided into two parts, the first part concerned with grammaticalization and the second part with parametric variation. These show what the application of contemporary theories of syntax and language variation can reveal about syntactic change and variation and the processes of parametric change which lie behind them.
The chapters also demonstrate the value of testing and constructing synchronic theories on the basis of historical data. The analyses range over many languages and language families, including Germanic, Romance, Greek, and Chinese.

Lampitelli, Roseano, Torres-Tamarit (2022). Vowel length in Friulian verbs: a case of mora affixation

Autors:

Nicola Lampitelli, Paolo Roseano, Francesc Torres-Tamarit

Títol:

Vowel length in Friulian verbs: a case of mora affixation

Editorial: Morphology, 32(1):1-28 (Springer)
Data de publicació: Febrer del 2022

Text complet

This paper deals with vowel length in Friulian, and shows that this is sometimes phonologically predictable and sometimes an instance of mora affixation in conjugation 1 verbs. Building on newly collected data on verbal morphology, we make the hypothesis that the Theme morpheme in conjugation 1 verbs in the dialect of Negrons has distinct allomorphs, among which a mora. This analysis of morphological length in Negrons Friulian shows that there is no need for a morphome-based analysis of the data. In our analysis, each morph, including length, spells out a morphosyntactic property.

Hamann & Torres-Tamarit (2023). Merger in Eivissan Catalan: an acoustic analysis of the vowel systems of young native speakers

Autors:

Silke Hamann & Francesc Torres-Tamarit

Títol:

Merger in Eivissan Catalan: an acoustic analysis of the vowel systems of young native speakers

Editorial: Phonetica (De Gruyter)
Data de publicació: 16 juny 2023

Més informació

The vowel system of Catalan has been the focus of many studies, though work on the varieties spoken on the island of Eivissa (Ibiza) are scarce, with a single mention of the possible merger of the mid back vowels /o, ɔ/ (Torres Torres, Marià. 1983. Aspectes del vocalisme tònic eivissenc. Eivissa 14. 22–23). The present article provides the first acoustic analysis of the vowel inventory of 25 young native speakers of Eivissan Catalan, with a focus on the realisations of stressed /ə, ɛ/, and the back mid vowels /o, ɔ/. We employed Pillai scores (Hay, Jennifer, Paul Warren & Katie Drager. 2006. Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a merger-in-progress. Journal of Phonetics 34. 458–484) to compare the possibly merged pairs /ə, ɛ/ and /o, ɔ/ to the fully-contrasting neighbouring pairs /e, ɛ/ and /o, u/. Our results show that all participants had considerable overlap of stressed /ə/ and /ɛ/, and all but one had considerable overlap of the back mid vowels, while the fully contrastive pairs (/e, ɛ/ and /o, u/) showed almost no overlap.

Torres-Tamarit & Martínez-Paricio (2023). The prosody of Spanish acronyms

Autors:

Francesc Torres-Tamarit & Violeta Martínez-Paricio

Títol:

The prosody of Spanish acronyms

Editorial: Natural Language & Linguistic Theory (Springer)
Data de publicació: 18 desembre 2023

Text complet

This paper presents a first attempt to formally characterize the prosodic properties of Spanish acronyms. Based on the examination of a dataset and the results of a written questionnaire and perception test administered to native speakers, the stress patterns and prosodic size of Spanish acronyms are investigated. We show that stress in acronyms follows the regular stress patterns of the language. We further claim that acronyms are restricted to an upper limit of three syllables, which we explain by resorting to layered feet. Additionally, we show that an interesting minimality requirement applies exclusively to acronyms, one that must be expressed not in terms of syllable weight, but rather in terms of the number of segments.

Faust & Torres-Tamarit (2024). Metrically conditioned /a/-syncope in Modern Hebrew compounds

torres 2024

Autors:

Noam Faust & Francesc Torres-Tamarit

Títol:

Metrically conditioned /a/-syncope in Modern Hebrew compounds

Editorial: Natural Language & Linguistic Theory (Springer Link)
Data de publicació: 29 maig 2024

Text complet

In Modern Hebrew, some, but not all, nominals exhibit obligatory /a/-syncope in open syllables if they are antepretonic in a simple (nominal) word. The same vowels optionally syncopate in any pretonic syllable in non-final members of compounds. Here we first show that syncope in compounds fills a gap in the typology of weak positions. We then propose a formal analysis in Gradient Harmonic Grammar (Smolensky and Goldrick 2016), which distinguishes between a weak /a/ and a strong /a/. Only the former undergoes syncope in both configurations; and only in non-compounds is it protected by a positional faithfulness constraint referencing the head foot of the prosodic word. Optionality in compounds is shown to follow from Base-Derivative faithfulness.