Harry van der Hulst

The prosody-morphology interface

Contributors Preface 1. Introduction Rene Kager and Wim Zonneveld 2. On the moraic representation of underlying geminates: evidence from prosodic morphology Stuart Davis 3. Verbal reduplication in three Bantu languages Laura J. Downing 4. Prosodic morphology and tone: the case of Chichewa Larry M. Hyman and Al Mtenje 5. Exceptional stress-attracting suffixes in Turkish: representations versus the grammar Sharon Inkelas 6. Realignment Junko Ito and Armin Mester 7. Faithfulness and identity in prosodic morphology John J. McCarthy and Alan S. Prince 8. Austronesian nasal substitution and other NC effects Joe Pater 9. The prosodic base of the Hausa plural Sam Rosenthall 10. Prosodic optimality and prefixation in Polish Grazyna Rowicka 11. Double reduplications in parallel Suzanne Urbanczyk Index of subject Index of constraints Index of language Index of names.

Movement Phase in Signs and Co-Speech Gestures, and Their Transcriptions by Human Coders

The previous literature has suggested that the hand movement in co-speech gestures and signs consists of a series of phases with qualitatively different dynamic characteristics. In this paper, we propose a syntagmatic rule system for movement phases that applies to both co-speech gestures and signs. Descriptive criteria for the rule system were developed for the analysis video-recorded continuous production of signs and gesture. It involves segmenting a stream of body movement into phases and identifying different phase types. Two human coders used the criteria to analyze signs and cospeech gestures that are produced in natural discourse. It was found that the criteria yielded good inter-coder reliability. These criteria can be used for the technology of automatic recognition of signs and co-speech gestures in order to segment continuous production and identify the potentially meaningbearing phase.

Word prosodic systems in the languages of Europe

The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.

Units in the analysis of signs

In this article I will propose a model for the phonological representation of signs which is based on such general principles. These principles involve the claim that constituent structure for linguistic objects is HEADED and BINARY, and that one unit can be the head of successively more inclusive constituents. My goal will be to show that (a) well-established (although not always undisputed) empirical generalisations regarding the structure of monomorphemic signs (largely based on studies of American Sign Language) and (b) theoretical proposals regarding the hierarchical organisation of signs (in the spirit of feature geometry) can both be accommodated in a model which adopts a perspective on linguistic structure which is guided by these principles.

Head-dependent asymmetries in phonology: complexity and visibility *

Developments in phonological theory have led to the recognition that phonological representations have a layered constituent structure. Many, perhaps all, of these constituents contain elements which can be identified as heads. Heads enter into various kinds of relations with their dependents. In this article, we identify a phenomenon which is quite pervasive in every part of phonology which has heads and dependents, namely, the existence of head–dependent asymmetries (henceforth HDAs). While various particular manifestations of these asymmetries are well known and have been much studied, this is the first attempt, to our knowledge, to unite a broad range of seemingly different phenomena under one heading. We identify various types of HDAs, and propose constraints on possible HDAs. Most importantly, we distinguish between HDAs that involve complexity, and those that involve visibility. These have properties which potentially contradict each other. We propose that they apply in fundamentally different types of cases: unlike complexity HDAs, visibility HDAs are limited to mappings from one phonological plane to another, and so are related to the notion of projection (cf. Vergnaud 1977). We also wish to show that an understanding of HDAs reveals general structural principles that play a role in diverse phenomena at various levels of the phonological hierarchy. For example, the fact noted in the Optimality Theory literature that certain positions tend to be more ‘faithful’ to underlying specifications (Beckman 1998) is a consequence of the fact that heads allow more complexity. These principles act as constraints on possible constraints, and on possible mappings from one plane to another.

Recursion and Human Language

In this volume, the issue of recursion is tackled from a variety of angles. Some articles cover formal issues regarding the proper characterization or definition of recursion, while others focus on empirical issues by examining the kinds of structure in languages that suggest recursive mechanism in the grammar. Most articles discuss syntactic phenomena, but several involve morphology, the lexicon and phonology. In addition, we find discussions that involve evolutionary notions and language disorders, and the broader cognitive context of recursion.

Weight-by-Position by Position

This paper proposes an Optimality-Theoretic (Prince and Smolensky 1993) account of variable closed syllable weight. It is shown here that contextually-dependent weight, as Hayes (1994) calls it, is a consequence of simultaneously comparing monomoraic and bimoraic parses of closed syllables for constraint satisfaction. The weight of closed syllables is a consequence of constraint interaction that determines the moraicity of coda consonants. These constraints are shown to conflict with higher ranking metrical constraints leading to contextually-dependent weight.Two types of constraint interaction are discussed here: (1) closed syllables are light, but contextually heavy to satisfy some higher ranking constraint and (2) closed syllables are heavy, but are contextually light for the same reason. The behavior of closed syllables with respect to the constraint hierarchy is contrasted with the behavior of vowels in the same context. The independent behavior of long vowels and closed syllables is shown here to follow from the different Correspondence constraints (McCarthy and Prince 1995) that determine the weight of vowels and closed syllables.

Locality and the nature of nasal harmony

There is a general consensus in phonology that relations conform to a locality requirement imposing a strict adjacency condition on related entities. One pattern of nasal harmony adheres to this condition; nasality extends over a sequence of segments that may include vowels, semivowels, liquids, nasals and fricatives, and no segments can be skipped. In another pattern, locality appears to be violated, because obstruents are invariably transparent. This paper proposes a novel solution to the locality problem posed by the latter by advancing a theory in which nasality always spreads locally either at the segmental level or at the level of the heads/nucleus of syllables. The apparent skipping of obstruents arises in the second mode of spreading, a type of vowel harmony. The analysis attributes the obligatory nasalisation of sonorant consonants when harmony is the nucleus-to-nucleus type to an independent principle of Syllable Nasalisation, which is necessarily in effect when Nasal is a syllabic feature.

The Phonology of Tone: The Representation of Tonal Register

Seven studies of the representation of tone in tonal languages such as Dschang Bamileke, Ebrie, and East Asian languages. In addition to analyzing specific languages, they discuss tonal geometry, a metrical theory of intonational downstep, prosodic government, and other topics. Annotation copyright

Word stress : theoretical and typological issues

Part I. The Phenomenon of Stress: 1. The study of word accent and stress: past, present and future Harry van der Hulst 2. Do all languages have word accent? Larry M. Hyman 3. Disentangling stress and pitch accent: toward a typology of prominence at different prosodic levels Matthew Gordon 4. The separation of accent and rhythm: evidence from StressTyp Rob Goedemans and Harry van der Hulst Part II. The Description, Selection and Use of Stress Data: 5. Evaluating evidence for stress systems Paul de Lacy 6. Convergence of prominence systems? Keren Rice 7. Rhetorical stress in Spanish Jose I. Hualde and Marianna Nadeu Part III. The Analysis of Stress Types/Stress Phenomena: 8. Culminativity times harmony equals unbounded stress Jeffrey Heinz 9. Possible and impossible exceptions in Dutch word stress Carlos Gussenhoven 10. Symmetries and asymmetries in secondary stress patterns Brett Hyde 11. Representing rhythm Harry van der Hulst.