Charles N. Li

Language, speech and mind : studies in honour of Victoria A. Fromkin

Part I: Phonetic and Phonological Studies 1. Creak as a Sociophonetic Marker Caroline G. Henton, Davis and Anthony Bladon, 2. On Feature Copying: Parameters of Tone Rules Larry M. Hyman and Douglas Pulleyblank, 3. Phonological Features for Places of Articulation Peter Ladefoged and Ian Maddieson, 4. Phonetic Universals in Consonant Systems Bjorn Lindblom, and Ian Maddieson Part II: Clinical and Neurolinguistic Studies 5. Abnormal Language Acquisition and Grammar: Evidence for the Modularity of Language Susan Curtis, 6. The Neuroanatomical Correlates of Aphasia and the Understanding of the Nearal Substrates of Language Antonio R. Damasio and Hanna Damasio, 7. The Long-Term Linguistic Consequences of Traumatic Head-Injury in Children: A Review John H. V. Gilbert, 8. The Neurolinguistic Substrate for Sign Language Edward S. Klima, and Ursula Bellugi, 9. Functional Levels in Normal, Intensified and Aphasic Speech John C. Marshall and Freda Newcombe, 10. William Elder (1864-1931): Diagram Maker and Experimentalist Harry A. Whitaker, 11. The Independence of Language: Evidence from a Retarded Hyperlinguistic Individual Jeni Yamada, Part III: Other Psycholinguistic and Linguistic Studies 12. The Perfect Speech Error Anne Cutler, 13. Free Reading and the development of Literacy Stephen D. Krashen, 14. The Scarcity of Speech Errors in Hindi Manjari Ohala, and John J. Ohala, 15. Empiricism and Universal Grammar in Chomskys Work Sven Ohman, 16. Linguistics and Computer Speech Recognition Robert D. Rodman, 17. Whats in a Name: Inferences from Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomena Paul Schachter, 18. A Relevance-Theoretic Account of Conditions Neil Smith, and Amahl Smith,.

Synchrony vs. Diachrony in Language Structure.

A number of syntactic constructions in Mandarin Chinese are analysed-which, synchronically, are unrelated and highly irregular. However, all reflect a diachronic drift from VO to OV typology which has been operating in Mandarin Chinese. In the light of this diachronic drift, the syntactic constructions can be viewed as structures in transition, and the synchronic irregularities as manifestations of the transitional process.*

The Acquisition of Tone

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses five sets of question regarding the acquisition of tone. All five sets include questions that may be related to the research on the nature of segmental phonology acquisition in that possible differences between segmental and tonal acquisition have particular bearing on phonological theory: (1) chronology of acquisition: (A) what is the relationship between the time when the child has mastered the tone system and the time when E1 has mastered the segmental system of Es language? and (B) in what order is mastery over the various tones in the system acquired?; (2) deviations from the adult norm: (A) what range of substitutions do children make for tones which they have not yet mastered or acquired which occur in the adult language?; (3) variation in the process of acquisition: (A) to what extent is there variation in strategies for tone acquisition among children learning the same language? and (B) to what extent is there variation in the acquisition of tone from one language to another?; (4) tone rules: (A) what are the differences in the childs output before, during, and after a tone rule is acquired? and (B) at what stage of the acquisitional process are tone rules acquired?; and (5) the childs perception of tone: (A) to what extent is tone perception more advanced than tone production in first language acquisition? And (B) in what way do the childs problems in perceiving tonal contrasts parallel apparent difficulties in the production of these contrasts?

Subject and Word Order in Wappo.

Our fieldwork on Wappo was conducted under the sponsorship of the Survey of California and other American Indian Languages, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley. We are indebted to Mary Haas and Wallace Chafe for providing us with the support from the Survey and encouraging us to study the structure of Wappo. We are also grateful to John Davis, Aryeh Faltz, Marie-Claude Paris, Edith Moravcsik, Mickey Noonan, and Marc Okrand for reading the first draft of this article (by Li and Thompson) and giving us their invaluable comments and criticisms. In particular, Edith Moravcsik provided us with detailed suggestions and insightful observations which led to much substantial improvement in this article. None of these people, of course, is responsible for the interpretation of their remarks which we have made. Finally, we are most deeply indebted to our informant, Laura Somersal. She has been a tireless, patient, and magnificent teacher to us during all of our field trips to her homeland. The system of transcriptions used in this article is adopted from Jesse Sawyer, EnglishWappo Vocabulary, UCPL, no. 43 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1965). The diacritic mark, comma, on top of a letter denotes glottalization. [h] after a stop indicates aspira-

SYNCHRONY AND DIACHRONY: THE MANDARIN COMPARATIVE

The Mandarin comparative construction is constrained in an interesting way: essentially, only subjects can be compared. In seeking to understand this fact, we note that no other language with such a constraint has come to our attention; consequently we are led to consider historical explanations rather than strictly semantic ones. What we have found is that diachronic considerations enable us to understand not only the existence of this constraint in modern Mandarin, but also the particular way in which it is being relaxed. The remainder of the discussion is organized äs follows: Section II presents the synchronic facts which support the generalization that the comparative is restricted to subjects in Mandarin. Section III outlines the historical development of the comparative construction and shows how it provides an understanding of the subjects-only constraint äs well äs of the particular extension of the construction in current Mandarin.