The goal of this study is to provide crosslinguistic data on the acquisition of phonetic complexity among children acquiring four different languages: Tunisian Arabic, Tashlhiyt Berber, English, and French. Using an adaptation of Jakielski's (2000) Index of Phonetic Complexity (IPC), we carried out an analysis to assess phonetic complexity of children's early vocabulary in the four languages. Four different samples from each language were analyzed: 50 words selected from an adult dictionary of each language, 50 words from child-directed speech, 50 words targeted by the child, and the child's actual pronunciations of those 50 words. Globally, we hypothesized that children's early productions would be shaped by universal articulatory constraints, but also by the language they are exposed to, depending on its phonological complexity. Our findings show that Arabic displays higher degrees of complexity compared to Berber, English and French, and that children acquiring Arabic target and produce more complex words than children learning Berber, English and French.

This article outlines the differences in goals, methods and results that variationist researchers may encounter when exploring and/or documenting a threatened language variety, and underscores special considerations and aspects of the research program that linguists must work to control for when working with endangered varieties of Western languages. In particular, it examines questions and strategies for dealing with sparse data for longitudinal studies; fewer speakers for stratified samples; the inverse relation between linguistic fluency and age; social network constraints in small speech communities; literacy-centric exercises in oral language communities; and larger project protocols designed for stable linguistic communities. Throughout the paper, the collection and analysis of Louisiana French liaison data from 1939, 1977, and 2010 provide an application of the proposed methods.

This article measures the productivity index of the Old English suffixes -cund, -ful, and -isc as well as the prefix ful- and checks the results against the diachronic evolution of the affixes. The frameworks brought to the discussion include Type frequency measurement, as well as productivity indexes proposed by Baayen (1992, 1993, 2009) and Trips (2009). The sources are both textual (The Dictionary of Old English Corpus) and lexicographical (the lexical database of Old English Nerthus). The conclusion drawn is that Baayen's (1992, 1993, 2002) index of Global Productivity provides the most consistent results with the diachronic evolution of the affixes.

In child language, consonants often assimilate in primary place of articulation across intervening vowels. In adult language, primary place assimilation occurs only between adjacent consonants. In both cases, the first consonant usually assimilates to the second. The standard analysis of directionality of local assimilation in Optimality Theory uses positional faithfulness to protect the second consonant. In this article, it is argued that directionality in child language assimilation is due not to positional faithfulness, but to a markedness constraint that specifies that a consonant preceding a dorsal must agree in place of articulation with it. Along with directionality, this constraint accounts for cases in which dorsals, but not labials, trigger assimilation, which occurs in Korean as well as in child language. Differences between the attested types of assimilation in adult and child language can be explained by differences in the activity of positional faithfulness in the two domains.

This article deals with morphosyntactic variation. Focusing on subject doubling in Québec Colloquial French (QCF), the author argues in favor of a conception of linguistic competence which allows for variation. Various analyses which exclude variation from linguistic competence are considered and rejected, and it is concluded that the alternation between doubled and non-doubled constructions is an integral part of the linguistic competence of QCF speakers. The author then raises the question of the plausibility of an analysis which posits variable subject-verb agreement. She demonstrates that variable agreement systems are common crosslinguistically and that the analysis proposed for QCF is in consequence a quite reasonable one. Finally, an analysis is sketched within Chomsky’s Minimalist Program, showing that current linguistic theory is equipped for handling language-internal morphosyntactic variation.

Complex communication difficulties involving stylistics, logic and clarity in the discourse structures of advanced English compositions by writers from another language and culture cannot be explained as merely insufficient knowledge of English grammar, diction or idiom. Such problems do not only involve linguistic differences in the native (NL) and target language (TL) but encompass different stylistic habits, different ways of thinking, and different cultural values. Robert Kaplan has frequently argued that the rhetoric and logic in ESL English compositions vary according to the native language and culture of the writer. In one of his early essays he states:

This article is centred on the concept of the deictic feature embedded in demonstratives. A principled taxonomy of deictic features attested cross-linguistically is proposed, with the aim of being as comprehensive as possible. The list of deictic features previously identified is greatly expanded to include 15 features, with which 52 deictic values are associated. The morphological strategies for encoding deictic features in demonstratives are also examined. Three techniques are identified: (i) isolating; (ii) agglutinative or serial; and (iii) inflectional encoding. A number of the deictic features discussed in this article, along with their morphological realization strategies, are illustrated with data from the Miao Group of languages, spoken in the People’s Republic of China.

This paper is an informal summary preview of Eyak structure, with a minimum of exemplification and a maximum of structural tables and diagrams. Included are a number of historical and comparative remarks with reference to Athapaskan and Tlingit. There are still three persons capable of serving adequately as informants for Eyak. The following is a summary report of the results of field-work with these persons, up to July 10, 1964, on a grant from the National Science Foundation. The phonology of Eyak is now well understood, as is, more surprisingly, the verb. In addition, the list of morphemes is approaching exhaustiveness. The consonant inventory is shown in Table I:

In investigations of the question of whether or not Universal Grammar (UG) is available in non-primary language acquisition, a number of researchers have tried to isolate situations where the way principles of UG operate in the first language (L1) could not help the learner acquire the relevant properties of the second language (L2). If learners show evidence of acquiring properties of the L2 that could not be acquired from the input alone and could not be reconstructed via the L1, this suggests that UG is available in non-primary acquisition; in contrast, if learners fail under such circumstances, this supports the claim that UG is no longer directly accessible. In particular, there has been a tradition of looking at island constraints in this light, using L1s and L2s which differ radically in terms of the surface effects of principles like Subjacency and the Empty Category Principle (ECP) (e.g., Bley-Vroman et al 1988; Johnson and Newport 1991; Martohardjono 1991a, 1991b; Martohardjono and Gair 1992; Schachter 1989, 1990; White 1989, 1992).

This paper has two purposes. The first is to focus attention on the gradient nature of sound change. This characteristic of sound change, although an important one, is often overlooked. King (1969: 122), for example, states: “Phonological changes tend to affect natural classes of sounds (p, t, k, high vowels, voiced stops) because rules that affect natural classes are simpler than rules that apply only to single segments.” This perspective obscures the generalization pattern of phonological processes, for a particular process typically affects a subsection of a natural class and then may (or may not) generalize to other members of the particular class or even to other classes. The second purpose of this paper is to account for selected cases of gradient phonological change in Italian and other Romance languages on the basis of a partial theory of syllable structure preferences.

This study provides the first wide-scale, apparent time, instrumental description of the Canadian Shift in mainstream Toronto English. In contrast with some previous findings, the Toronto data suggest that for the last 70 years or more the shift has not affected the high front lax vowel (i). We observe that the movement of the nonhigh front lax vowels (ε) and (æ) involves both lowering and retraction in Toronto English, although retraction is the primary direction of more recent change and the shift appears to be slowing down. Our findings also suggest that continued retraction of the vowel resulting from the low back merger is involved in the final stage of the shift. We do not find evidence of a chain shift but instead propose that a parallel shift is occurring and make reference to Vowel Dispersion Theory in our discussion.

This article accounts for the distribution and the formal properties of the conjunct verb in Sheshatshit Montagnais within the theoretical model of the Minimalist Program. A subset of the syntactic environments in which the conjunct verb occurs obligatorily is examined: subordinate clauses, non-past wh-questions, and negated clauses. Wh-phrases and subordinate clauses are associated cross-linguistically with a CP projection. It is shown that the two principal negative morphemes in Sheshatshit Montagnais are also associated with a CP projection, thereby obtaining a common underlying structure for clauses requiring conjunct verbs. Central to this analysis is the claim that conjunct verbs move to the Comp position while independent verbs move to Infl. Associating conjunct and independent verbs with distinct functional categories not only predicts their distribution but also accounts for their most distinctive formal properties.

A phenomenon that is encountered fairly frequently in Spanish but has received relatively little attention on the part of linguists is the use of the singular indirect object pronoun le when the plural les would be expected, as illustrated in the following examples:

Hay que darle un justo precio a las personas. (BOG-8:107)

Mi papá le tenía terror a las balas perdidas. (CAR-34:615)

Nosotros le calentamos a los niños la comida. (HAV-2:30)

Se le ponía bola negra a las que se lo merecían. (MAD-16:266)

Es poco el tiempo que puedo dedicarle a mis hijos. (MEX-13:168)

To my knowledge, only Kany (1951:107–109) has attempted to deal with this topic in a comprehensive, global manner, and his presentation is limited to one brief paragraph of commentary illustrated by examples taken primarily from works written in the 1920s and 1930s. The present paper will present a general study of this construction focusing primarily on a description of its contemporary usage as reflected in the spoken Spanish of educated speakers from eleven cities, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Havana, La Paz, Lima, Madrid, Mexico City, San Juan (Puerto Rico), Santiago (Chile) and Seville.

This article is devoted to the emergence of a new paradigm in French and Romance: that of nominal determiners. Latin had no articles, and although possessives, demonstratives and indefinites could determine the noun, they could also be used as pronouns or adjectives, so that the morpho-syntactic category of nominal determiners did not exist as such. We first examine the diachronic evolution of French, where a far-reaching grammaticalization process took place. Syntagmatically, all determiners end up in the NP-initial position as the only available syntactic slot, contributing to the highly configurational NP pattern characteristic of Modern French. From a paradigmatic viewpoint, determiners no longer correspond to a syntactic function, but to a separate morpho-syntactic category. We also evaluate to what extent this evolution took place in two other Romance languages, Italian and Spanish. Through the analysis of this particular evolution, based on parallel corpora consisting of a Latin text and its translations in Old, Middle, and Modern French on the one hand, and in Spanish and Italian on the other, our study also provides evidence for more general mechanisms, analogy in particular, at work in the creation of new paradigms.

One proposal which has played and continues to play an important role in the syntactic analysis of Romance prepositional phrases is that not everything which looks like a preposition is in fact a true preposition. First proposed by Vergnaud (1974) for French, the idea is that some apparent Ps actually act as simple Case-marking on an NP; in Vergnaud’s case, this was the à associated with Goal arguments. As a result, the syntactic representation of Goal arguments involves no PP-node, but rather an NP with an inflectional Case-marking à. Vergnaud’s proposal was developed further for French à by Kayne (1975) and Jaeggli (1981), and is assumed to be valid for French de by Elliott (1986). Chomsky (1986) also suggests that English of is in many cases the realization of genitive Case, and Demonte (1989) argues that many instances of Spanish a or de phrases selected for by verbs are not PPs but rather NPs marked with Case.

Cet article réexamine le concept de réseau social utilisé en sociolinguistique variationniste en analysant le rôle que jouent divers domaines d’affiliation liés aux liens forts et aux liens faibles à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur de la communauté dans la variation morphosyntaxique dans les expressions en tête des propositions adverbiales du français acadien du nord-est du Nouveau-Brunswick (Canada). D’après les résultats d’analyses de type règle variable, le facteur réseau social est en mesure de prédire l’emploi des formes traditionnelles comme que, quand que et si que de manière plus stable que tout autre facteur extralinguistique, incluant la classe sociale. L’analyse des correspondances est utilisée pour opérationnaliser le facteur réseau social à partir des affiliations des sujets dans les domaines d’affiliation. Cette étude suggère que, dans l’explication de la variation sociolinguistique, les liens faibles méritent un examen plus approfondi et que les statistiques multivariées sont un outil des plus appropriés pour ce genre d’étude.

Paradis and LaCharité (1996, 1997) have proposed a model of loanword adaptation, couched within the Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies (Paradis 1988a,b). One of the mechanisms used in their model, called the Threshold Principle, first advanced by Paradis, Lebel, and LaCharité (1993), poses problems. This principle, whose implementation implies arithmetic counting, goes counter to standard views of generative phonology against counting. In this article, an analysis of deletion contexts found in loanwords which accounts for the data observed on structural grounds only is developed without any appeal to arithmetic counting. Based on the adaptation of French rising diphthongs and nasal vowels in two languages, Fula and Kinyarwanda, it is argued that an analysis based solely on the segmental representations of the foreign forms to adapt and the segmental and syllabic constraints of the borrowing language is sufficient to make correct predictions regarding the adaptation patterns found in these languages.

1. 1. In the last issue of the JCLA (March 1957) I made a tentative phonetic analysis of the English spoken by the younger generation in the Vancouver area. On the basis of that analysis I propose in this article to go on to the examination of one of the problems that face us in the phonemic classification of the Vancouver vowels.

2. 2. I should like to stress from the beginning that this problem is distributional, for whatever our views on the nature of the phoneme — whether we regard it as a concrete, practical unit, useful in the description of languages and dialects known or hitherto unknown, or whether we consider it as an abstract Platonic idea whose translation to the real world involves a series of Protean adaptations or adjustments to the phonological environment — in either case, the most important factor to be considered is distribution.

Dans deux articles récents, (Surridge 1985, 1986), l'auteur a examiné le rôle de la morphologie lexicale dans l'attribution du genre grammatical en français, ainsi que la relation des facteurs morphologiques avec les facteurs phonétiques identifiés par Tucker, Rigault et Lambert (1970). Parmi les linguistes et les grammairiens qui ont traité les facteurs déterminant le genre des noms en français, la majorité sinon tous attribuent un certain rôle à un autre facteur: c'est-à-dire l'élément sémantique. Jusquéà présent, cependant, ni le facteur sémantique en tant que tel ni la relation entre les facteurs sémantiques et les autres n'a été soumis à une étude formelle. Ceci résulte pour les intéressés (linguistes, enseignants et apprenants du français) en une image confuse du système d'attribution comme le fait, par exemple, la constatation suivante:

Les genres sont conditionnés par les suffixes, et peut-être motivés par les sens, à moins que les sens ne soient conditionnés par les genres … GLLF 1971(3): 2205