Acoustic research on the prosody and intonation of Northwest Coast languages has until recently been under-researched. This paper joins the growing body of research on the subject and reports on the results of the first study of intonation in St’át'imcets (Lillooet Salish; Northern Interior Salish). It tests the generalization proposed by Davis (2007) that information structure is not correlated with prosody in Salish languages by comparing the intonation contours of declaratives and yes/no questions. Specifically, I ask two questions: is nuclear accent rightmost? And are yes/no questions associated with higher pitch, as predicted by the Universality of Intonational Meaning? Results are comparable to those reported for other Salish languages, namely Koch (2008, 2011) on Nɬeʔkepmxcín, Jacobs (2007) on Skwxwú7mesh and Benner (2004, 2006) and Leonard (2011) on SENĆOŦEN. Nuclear accent is associated with the rightmost stressed vowel, regardless of focus, and while no speaker signals yes/no questions with a final rise, each has higher pitch within typologically common parameters.

Notre étude traite de l'alternance des formes exprimant les notions de « véhicule automobile » et de « travail rémunéré » dans un corpus d'entrevues recueillies dans le village franco-ontarien de Casselman. Après avoir présenté les études antérieures portant sur la variation lexicale en français laurentien, nous exposons nos hypothèses, les principales caractéristiques de la communauté de Casselman, la méthodologie, puis nos résultats analysés à la lumière des recherches publiées jusqu’à maintenant. Notre objectif est de fournir des données provenant d'entrevues récentes, réalisées auprès d'adultes et d'adolescents franco-ontariens, afin de : 1) dégager les points de convergence et de divergence dans les pratiques linguistiques des Franco-Ontariens observés jusqu’à présent, 2) fournir des preuves supplémentaires appuyant la thèse de l'unité des variétés de français laurentien, et plus globalement, 3) illustrer à nouveau l'intérêt des études lexicales en linguistique variationniste.

This paper presents an analysis of reflexives in Shona. Taking seriously the observation that the reflexive morpheme zvi- is homophonous with one of Shona's object markers, I argue that this homophony is not accidental. Rather, the morpheme that emerges in reflexive contexts is object marking triggered by a covert anaphor. The analysis rests on two planks: first, establishing that zvi- is the default agreement form in the language generally; and second, establishing that a covert anaphor may trigger such an agreement. In so doing, a treatment of object marking as the exponence of discourse-givenness is advanced. The analysis is compatible with treatments of object marking in Shona as either an agreement affix or a clitic. Theoretical issues related to default agreement, covert anaphors, and distinctions between discourse-givenness and topicality are also discussed, along with an alternative account treating zvi- as a valence-reducing derivational affix.

La distribution des variables utilisées pour l'expression de l'ultériorité a fait l'objet de nombreuses études, centrées sur l'oral conversationnel ou sur l’écrit. Cet article apporte un éclairage inédit sur la question en considérant les marqueurs du futur dans un contexte communicatif d'oral préparé (le bulletin météo télévisé), et dans une optique diatopique (comparaison d'un corpus français et d'un corpus québécois). L'analyse distributionnelle indique une distribution des variables spécifique au contexte discursif. Par ailleurs, l'analyse multivariée par Goldvarb X révèle une variation diatopique et l'influence de certains facteurs linguistiques, en particulier celui du type de verbe, de même que des contraintes particulières pour les deux communautés étudiées.

This paper provides a metric for determining whether a given pair of English words is perceived to be morphologically related, based on objective measurements of the words’ orthographic, phonetic, and semantic similarity to each other. The metric is developed on the basis of results from a behavioural study in which participants were asked to judge the relative similarity of pairs of words. The metric is intended to help researchers determine which forms in a language plausibly have segments that alternate; as an example, it is applied to the lexicon of English to illustrate its utility in calculating the frequency of alternation of [s] and [ʃ].

This paper investigates the correlative construction in Isbukun Bunun, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan. I show that in this language the correlative clause and its associated anaphoric element do not form a constituent at any point in the derivation. Drawing on evidence from island-insensitivity, the absence of Condition C effects and non-constituency facts, I propose that the syntactic relation between the correlative clause and the nominal correlate is derived by a base-generated adjunction structure. Moreover, I argue that the correlative clause, which behaves as a generalized quantifier, binds the nominal correlate phrase in the matrix clause, which is construed as a bound variable. The proposed quantificational binding view is further shown to capture the types of correlate phrases allowed in Isbukun Bunun correlatives.

This study seeks to advance understanding of second-language (L2) acquisition of future-time reference in French, by comparing the developmental trajectories of learners living in and away from the target-language setting. Study-abroad learners in France (n = 45), foreign-language learners living in the US (n = 37), and native speakers of Hexagonal French (n = 30) participated in this study. They completed a written-contextualized task, a language-proficiency test and a background questionnaire. For each written-contextualized-task item, participants selected from among three responses that differed with respect to the form (inflectional future, periphrastic future, present). Items were designed to test for the influence of three factors on the form selected: presence/absence of a lexical temporal indicator, temporal distance, and (un)certainty. Additionally, two extra-linguistic factors were examined: learning context and proficiency level. The analyses of frequency and the multinomial logistic regressions suggest that, despite developmental similarities between learning contexts, acquisitional paths of study-abroad and foreign-language learners were not identical.

In this paper, I show that Embick's (2010) cyclic head approach to regular morphology alone cannot account for the freely available variations in the realization of nominalizers in English nominalizations involving overt verbalizers. Instead, I offer an account of the regularity effects using the technology of Local Dislocation (Embick and Noyer 2001, Embick and Marantz 2008, Embick 2007a, 2007b). Using this analysis, I derive both the variable nominalization patterns and the restrictions on particles and results in derived nominals from Sichel (2010). By treating regularity as the by-product of extant morphosyntatic operations, we can better explain the distribution of regular and irregular nominalizers and account for particle/result restrictions in English derived nominals.

This article adds a Caribbean perspective to the analysis of futurity by presenting a quantitative variationist investigation of the competing forms used by speakers to encode future time in the French département et région d'outre-mer of Martinique. The two variants under investigation are the inflected future (je partirai ‘I will leave’) and the periphrastic future (je vais partir ‘I am going to leave’). In this variety, the periphrastic future is identified as the most frequent variant. Fixed-effects and mixed-effects models furthermore tease apart the complex set of constraints governing variant selection and demonstrate the repercussions of considering speaker and lexical effects when analysing sociolinguistic data. Indeed, once individual speaker and word-level variation are controlled for, the future variable in Martinique French is constrained purely by temporal distance: while the periphrastic future acts as the default option in the majority of time contexts, the inflected future functions as the marker of distal time.

Stressed syllables in European Portuguese contrast seven oral vowels, /i, u, e, o, ε, ɔ, a/, which are reduced to a simpler four-vowel set in unstressed syllables. Although /a/ never undergoes any phonological neutralization through vowel reduction, it has a raised allophone [ɐ] which occurs in several environments

This article examines future temporal reference (FTR) in the French spoken in Vimeu, a rural area of France where French evolved alongside Picard, a Gallo-Romance regional language. Unlike most French varieties, which favour periphrasis, Vimeu Picard favours the inflected form. By comparing French data from Picard–French bilinguals and French monolinguals, we assess the potential effect of Picard contact on Vimeu French. We hypothesized that bilinguals may favour the inflected form more than monolinguals, a hypothesis that was not verified. Instead, education is the best social predictor: speakers with a baccalauréat or higher disfavour the periphrastic future. Regarding linguistic constraints, we expected sentential polarity to constrain FTR (negation favours the inflected form), as in many varieties. Surprisingly, only temporal distance constrains FTR in our data: proximate events favour periphrasis, and do so even more strongly with events to occur within the minute. These results suggest that Vimeu French marks imminence through periphrasis.