First Published in 2002. This volume is part of the 'Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics' series. This study focuses on the Japanese particle mo. The particle is probably best described as roughly equivalent to the English too or also, although the difference between the Japanese particle and the English counterparts will be soon revealed as an important part of this study. This study has two goals, which are related to one another. The first goal is to prescribe a monosemous account for what is presupposed by the usage of mo by investigating its constraints on the context. The second goal is to develop a model in which the discourse-level contribution of a linguistic form is explained by its instruction on the hearer's processing the sentence at the propositional level.
It has become well recognized that affective dimensions of language constitute an integral part of the linguistic system. Japanese provides a prime example of the significance of emotivity as it has grammaticalized a wide variety of expressions to communicate affective information. The collected articles demonstrate the rich diversity of emotive communication in Japanese and analyze various expressions with theoretical perspectives that are often independent from Western models. This volume reflects the influence of traditional Japanese scholars for whom examining affective-relational aspects of language has long been a central concern. The authors are also influenced by more recent scholars in Japanese pragmatics such as Susumu Kuno, Akio Kamio, and Senko K. Maynard. They also draw on anthropological notions such as the inside vs. outside dichotomy that have been used to describe Japanese society.
First Published in 2002. This volume is part of the 'Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics' series. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the syntax of possession expressions in Japanese at the sentential level. It starts with a background of possessive syntax and illustrates how Japanese presents us with an interesting case study of possessive syntax
First Published in 2002. Part of the Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics series, this is an in-depth investigation of the effects of duration and sonority on contour tone distribution. The term “tone language” usually refers to languages in which the pitch of a syllable serves lexical or grammatical functions. In some tone languages, the contrastive functions of pitch are sometimes played by pitch changes within a syllable. Pitch changes of this kind are called contour tones. The distribution of contour tones in a language, are when under what phonological contexts contour tones are more readily realized.
First Published in 2002. This volume is part of the 'Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics' series, and focuses on phonetics, phonology and diachrony of compensatory lengthening. The term compensatory lengthening (CL) refers to a set of phonological phenomena wherein the disappearance of one element of a representation is accompanied by a corresponding lengthening of another element. This study focuses on descriptive and formal similarities and divergences between CL of vowels triggered by consonant and by vowel loss.
First Published in 2003. Initially a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Maryland at College Park in August 2000, this book is a revised version with an expanded discussion on dissimilation, as well as looking at existential faithfulness relations in reduplicative TETU and feature movement.
This book explores effects of speech perception strategies upon morphological structure. Using connectionist modeling, perception and production experiments, and calculations over lexica, Jennifer Hay investigates the role of two factors known to be relevant to speech perception: phonotactics and lexical frequency. Hay demonstrates that low probability phoneme transitions across morpheme boundaries exert a considerable force toward the maintenance of complex words, and argues that the relative frequency of the derived form and the base significantly affects the decomposability of complex words. While many have claimed that high frequency forms do not tend to be decomposed, Hay asserts that this follows only when such forms are more frequent than the bases they contain. The results of Hay's experiments illustrate the tight connection between speech processing, lexical representations, and aspects of linguistic competence. The likelihood that a form will be parsed during speech perception has profound consequences, from its grammaticality as a base of affixation, through to fine details of its implementation in the phonetics.
This book is the first detailed investigation and description of phonotactic sound patterns affecting Khoesan click consonant inventories. It also includes the first quantitative study of phonation types in Khoesan languages, and the first study of phonation types associated with pharyngeal consonants all around. Although bases of OCP constraints have been presumed to be perceptual, this is the first quantitative study showing the acoustic basis of a particular OCP constraint in a specific language. Amanda L. Miller-Ockhuizen describes the phonetics and phonology of gutturals in the Khoesan language of Ju|'hoansi. Hers is the first study of voice quality cues associated with epiglottalized vowels. Thus, it is the first study to show that laryngeal and pharyngeal vowels are unified phonetically by non-modal voice qualities associated with them. It is also the first study to show that in addition to laryngeal coarticulation, whereby voice quality cues associated with laryngeal consonants are spread to a following vowel, pharyngeal coarticulation also involves spreading of voice quality cues. Thus, guttural consonants are united in that they all spread voice quality cues onto a following vowel. Voice quality cues found on vowels following guttural consonants are as large as similar cues associated with guttural vowels. This acoustic similarity is shown to be the basis of a novel Guttural OCP constraint found in the language, which is demonstrated to exist via co-occurrence patterns found over a recorded database of all of the known roots. Thus, this is the first book to provide a detailed perceptual basis of an OCP constraint. The database study also reports several other novel phonotactic constraints involving gutturals, as well as a reanalysis of the well-known Back Vowel Constraint. This book describes both phonetics and phonology of the natural class of guttural consonants, and shows through a quantitative acoustic investigation how the phonetic cues associated with these sounds are the bases of phonotactic constraints involving them.
