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This paper presents the results of a preliminary investigation on the documentation of the language of Khetrans. The Khetrans, being one of the many Baloch tribes that speak a language apart from Balochi, primarily occupy the Barkhan district of Balochistan. Earlier observations describe their language as forming a part of Sindhi or being a type of Lahnda. Khetrani is undoubtably a northwestern Indo-Aryan language, and the evidence at the researcher's disposal shows that it does share features with both Sindhi and Siraiki. Historically Khetrani lay well on a dialect continuum that spanned both of these languages and has preserved features intermediate to each. Its adjectival morphology is nearly the same as Siraiki's but the pronominal one closer to Sindhi. Khetrani verb structure is largely similar to and at par with Siraiki for it lacks the “richness” of Sindhi, despite the forms of many cognate verbs being identical to Sindhi. The most salient features of the verbal morphology aligning Khetrani with Siraiki are a sigmatic future and the continuous aspect. The valence model, however, is similar to Sindhi and Khetrani has a Passive Participle peculiar to itself. These features distinguish Khetrani as an independent language.

Current generative positions in dialectology have suggested that all dialects have the same underlying representations; this hypothesis has been offered to explain inter-dialectal communication. This paper argues that such an hypothesis, although perhaps reasonable, is not a necessary conclusion in explanation of inter-dialectal communication. The paper suggests that almost no empirical evidence has been offered in support of the hypothesis; more importantly, the paper argues that there are empirical and theoretical reasons for rejecting the claim.

This paper investigates the phonological nature of alphabetic acronyms in Japanese, e.g. PTA, JR, JTB. Japanese dialects exhibit tremendous variation as regards the accent of these alphabetic expressions. We can account for the relevant facts by relating their accent patterns to the compound accent rules of the respective dialects. In other words, Japanese speakers process alphabetic acronyms as compound nouns, generally applying compound accent rules across dialects. The accentual variation among the dialects turns out to be relatively superficial differences that result largely from the differences that the dialects exhibit with respect to the compound accent rules. This analysis is particularly interesting in light of the fact that English speakers apply a phrasal stress rule to the same expressions. We will explore the implications of the differences among the Japanese dialects, on the one hand, and between Japanese and English, on the other.

A central hypothesis of the Minimalist Program is that syntactic principles are constant across languages. Apparent syntactic variation would be reducible to variation in the lexicon, in particular variation in morphosyntactic features, and variation at the level of phonological interpretation (PF), in particular in the way syntactic structure is spelled out. This hypothesis invites large-scale microcomparative syntactic research, as minor morphosyntactic differences between closely related language varieties are expected to cause syntactic variation, such as variation in word order. In this paper, the hypothesis is tested against the data of the Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (SAND), a project in which over 100 syntactic variables in 267 dialects of Dutch were investigated. In four case studies, involving complementizer drop, one -insertion, strong reflexives and doubling in Wh-chains, it is shown that most of syntactic variation can indeed be reduced to lexicon and PF, but that there is a residue of variation in the syntactic module concerning the size of the constituents that are copied in movement operations. Two further conclusions are that syntax plays a role in the lexicon in that it determines the limits of lexical variation and that part of syntactic variation must be explained by language-external factors.

In this paper, I present a dialectal typology of pronominal object clitics in Greek, and claim that clitic positioning can be subject not only to syntactic restrictions but also to prosodic ones. More specifically, on the basis of a cross-dialectal survey, I provide a range of templates, i.e. prosodic patterns which clitics participate in with other constituents of the clause. Furthermore, I show that there is a hierarchy among these templates that ranks them according to their relative well-formedness. The most well-formed templates are found in 2P dialects, in which the exact position of a clitic relies crucially on phonology. This particular claim acquires greater significance when dialects that are in a transition from a 2P to a non-2P system are taken into consideration. These dialects provide valuable evidence for the vital role played by prosodic factors in language change. In light of these cross-dialectal findings, I propose a possible path in the development of non-2P clitics from 2P ones.

The alternations in obstruent voicing in the dialect of Breton found on the Ile de Groix are particularly interesting, since three modes of neutralisation can be observed: (i) final devoicing, i.e., obstruents surface as voiceless in syllable- or word-final position; (ii) obstruent voicing, which is observed when a word-final obstruent is followed by a vowel-or sonorant-initial word, and (iii) regressive as well as progressive voicing assimilation, which is found in obstruent clusters. The respective patterns give evidence for the following claims: first, [voice] is a binary valued feature and underspecification is a third option in Breton. The Breton voicing phenomena will be accounted for within the Correspondence/Markedness version of Optimality Theory. Second, the analysis crucially relies on the devices of positional markedness and positional faithfulness. Neither can be rejected in favour of the other. The last finding of this paper is that voicing assimilation in Breton is a side effect of the interaction of positional faithfulness and positional markedness. There is no evidence to assume a specific assimilation constraint, as is usually done in the Optimality theoretic literature on voicing assimilation (e.g. Gnanadesikan, 1997; Lombardi, 1999).