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[V]oice in Malagasy is less like voice in English and more like wh-agreement, of the sort which Chung (1998) documents for Chamorro. In A' -extraction contexts in Chamorro, regular subject agreement […] is replaced by special morphology indicating whether the extracted element is a subject, object, or oblique […]. In Pearson (to appear) I suggested that Malagasy voice marking is a 'generalized' version of this type of marking: While in Chamorro wh-agreement is confined to questions, relative clauses, and the like, in Malagasy it appears in all clause types due to a requirement that the specifier of WhP be filled in every clause. [...]
In this paper I focus on the voice affixes themselves and propose an account of their distribution. Specifically, I argue that they are realizations of light verbs and Case-checking heads, which combine with the root through head-to-head movement. The distribution of the affixes is determined by the positions from which, and through which, the null operator […] moves on its way to the specifier of WhP. For example, the actor-topic prefix m- is treated as a nominative Casechecking head, which gets spelled out just in case the operator raises through its specifier. (My analysis is thus in the spirit of Guilfoyle, Hung, & Travis (1992), who also associate voice morphemes with Case licensing.)
The filling of the 'Vorfeld' in German sentences is basically obligatory; which constituent, however, actually moves to the Vorfeld is underdetermined by syntax and thus governed presumably by discourse factors. Coming from English, there are certain competing expectations one could have: either the topic — more specifically, the backward-looking center — of a sentence is moved to the Vorfeld, or an element in a poset relationship to a set mentioned in the previous discourse, or elements with other functions, such as the exposition of brand-new information or the setting of a scene. A study of a corpus of texts of different stylistic levels showed that indeed all elements expected to appear in the Vorfeld are eligible for Vorfeld-movement, but that there is a strict ranking. Preferred Vorfeld-fillers are phrases containing brand-new information as well as scene-setting elements; only if no such elements are present can elements in a poset relationship with some previously mentioned set be moved to the Vorfeld. Finally, if such elements are not present either, backward-looking centers can move to the Vorfeld. Backward-looking centers have, for this reason, a relatively poor quota among Vorfeld-fillers, namely around 50%.
In this paper, we investigate two pairs of structures in German and English: German Weak Pronoun Left Dislocation and English Topicalization, on the one hand, and German and English Hanging Topic Left Dislocation, on the other. We review the prosodic, lexical, syntactic, and discourse evidence that places the former two structures into one class and the latter two into another, taking this evidence to show that dislocates in the former class are syntactically integrated into their 'host' sentences while those in the latter class are not. From there, we show that the most straightforward way to account for this difference in 'integration' is to take the dislocates in the latter structures to be 'orphans', phrases that are syntactically independent of the phrases with which they are associated, providing additional empirical and theoretical support for this analysis — which, we point out, has a number of antecedents in the literature.
The phenomenon of phonological opacity has been the subject of much debate in recent years, with scholars opposed to the Optimality Theory (OT) research program arguing that opacity proves OT must be false, while the solutions proposed within OT, such as sympathy theory and stratal OT , have proved to be unsatisfying to many OT proponents, who have found these proposals to be inconsistent with the parallelist approach to phonological processes otherwise characteristic of OT. In this paper I reexamine one of the best known cases of opacity, that found in three processes of Tiberian Hebrew (TH), and argue that these processes only appear to be opaque, because previous analyses have treated them as pure phonology, rather than as an interaction between phonology and morphology. Once it is recognized that certain words of TH are lexically marked to end with a syllabic trochee, and that the goal of paradigm uniformity exerts grammatical pressure on phonology, the three processes no longer present a problem to parallelist OT. The results suggest the possibility that all crosslinguistic instances of apparent opacity can be explained in terms of the phonology-morphology interface and that purely phonological opacity does not exist. If this claim is true, then parallelist OT can be defended against its detractors without the need for additional mechanisms like sympathy theory and stratal OT.
This study examines the movement trajectories of the dorsal tongue movements during symmetrical /VCa/ -sequences, where /V/ was one of the Hungarian long or short vowels /i,a,u/ and C either the voiceless palatal or velar stop consonants. General aims of this study were to deliver a data-driven account for (a) the evidence of the division between dorsality and coronality and (b) for the potential role coarticulatory factors could play for the relative frequency of velar palatalization processes in genetically unrelated languages. Results suggest a clear-cut demarcation between the behaviour of purely dorsal velars and the coronal palatals. Moreover, factors arising from a general movement economy might contribute to the palatalization processes mentioned.
The present study offers an Optimality-Theoretic analysis of the syllabification of intervocalic consonants and glides in Modern English. It will be argued that the proposed syllabifications fall out from universal markedness constraints – all of which derive motivation from other languages – and a language-specific ranking. The analysis offered below is therefore an alternative to the traditional rule-based analyses of English syllabification, e.g. Kahn (1976), Borowsky (1986), Giegerich (1992, 1999) and to the Optimality-Theoretic treatment proposed by Hammond (1999), whose analysis requires several language-specific constraints which apparently have no cross-linguistic motivation.
This paper investigates how syntax and focus interact in deriving the phonological phrasing of utterances in Xhosa, a Bantu language spoken in South Africa. Although the influence of syntax on phrasing is uncontroversial, a purely syntactic analysis cannot account for all the data reported for Xhosa by Jokweni (1995). Focus influences the phrasing in that it inserts a phonological phrase-boundary after the focused constituent. This generalization can account for the variation found in the phrasing of adverbials.
The findings are dealt with in an OT-based framework following Truckenbrodt's work on Chichewa (1995, 1999) which is extended to the phrasing of adjuncts.
In this paper, I argue that this apparent problem is accounted for by the interaction of constraints. For the fixed segment [ɛ] in Cɛ-reduplication, I argue that [ɛ] is the second least marked vowel in Palauan, which appears when the default vowel [ǝ] cannot appear. I show that the Palauan facts are not only consistent with the proposals of Urbanczyk (1999) and Alderete et. al (1999), but they actually provide support of their claims. In the following section, I discuss Urbanczyk's (1999) arguments concerning ROOT faithfulness in reduplication and possible asymmetries between affix reduplicants and root reduplicants. In Section 3, I introduce Palauan reduplication and discuss Finer's (1986) observations on the resulting state verb (RSV) form. I show that the RSV forms support the classification that Cɛ-reduplicants are affixes, and CVCV -reduplicants are roots. In Section 4, I discuss the shape and vowel quality of the two reduplicants. The CVCV-reduplicant has three variants: CǝCǝ, CǝC and CV. I explain this variation, illustrating why [ǝ] appears in the first two variations. Then, I discuss the shape and vowel quality of the Cɛ-reduplicant, arguing that the fixed segment [ɛ] in Cɛ-reduplication is a special case of TETU. I show that root faithfulness constraints are crucial in determining the shape and vowel quality of the reduplicants. Section 5 is the conclusion.
Ida'an-Begak is a Western Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by approximately 6,000 people on the east coast of Sabah, Malaysia, Borneo and belongs to the Sabahan subgroup of the North Borneo subgroup (Blust 1998). Ida'an-Begak has three dialects, Ida'an, spoken in the villages of Segama to the west of Lahad Datu, Ida'an Sungai spoken in the Kinabatangan and Sandakan districts, and Begak spoken in Ulu Tungku, to the east of Lahad Datu (Banker 1984).1 Moody (1993) deals with Ida'an; this paper concentrates on the Begak dialect. In this paper I will present new data gathered in the field and provide an analysis of the allomorphy. The study is based on spontaneous data as well as examples elicited from my language informants.
The goal of this paper is to survey the accent systems of the indigenous languages of Africa. Although roughly one third of the world’s languages are spoken in Africa, this continent has tended to be underrepresented in earlier stress and accent typology surveys, like Hyman (1977). This one aims to fill that gap. Two main contributions to the typology of accent are made by this study of African languages. First, it confirms Hyman's (1977) earlier finding that (stem-)initial and penult are the most common positions, cross-linguistically, to be assigned main stress. Further, it shows that not only stress but also tone and segment distribution can define prominence asymmetries which are best analyzed in terms of accent.