Daniel Currie Hall

Phonological contrast and its phonetic enhancement: dispersedness without dispersion *

This paper offers a novel account of a familiar typological observation, namely the tendency of phonological inventories to consist of segments that are dispersed through the available auditory space. In contrast to previous approaches, which have treated dispersion as a goal explicitly encoded in the grammar, this paper shows that the cross-linguistic pattern follows automatically from the interaction of two independently motivated factors: phonological representations in which only contrastive features are specified, and the enhancement of these features in phonetic implementation. The merits of this approach are illustrated by examples involving both vocalic and consonantal inventories.

The features and exponence of nominal number

This paper proposes a pair of morphosyntactic number features, [Discrete] and [Non-Atomic], and shows how they can contribute to an understanding of how grammatical number is expressed cross-linguistically. Starting with English, where mass nominals pattern syncretically sometimes with plural count nominals and sometimes with singular ones, we use these features to improve upon a previous account (Cowper & Hall 2002), and then extend the analysis to mass–count syncretisms in Lingala and Manam and to classifiers in Western Armenian and Mandarin. We account for the crosslinguistic variation using a consistent set of features and a highly constrained theory of morphological exponence, and argue that the variation arises from differences in the syntactic structures in which the features appear and the paradigmatic systems of contrast in which they participate.