Search

This paper analyses two 18th century texts and focuses on hypercorrections found in the spelling of sibilants, i.e. examples where an etymological apical fricative is represented with spelling elsewhere used for laminal fricatives. The texts used are Lubieta’s dictionary (written in the central variety of Donostia/San Sebastián) and sermons composed by Bizente Sarria (written in the western variety of Etxebarri). As for Lubieta’s text, in previous research hypercorrections have been interpreted to be related to an ongoing merger in which the apico-alveolar fricative merges with the apico-laminal, and the remaining sound is the laminal. In Sarria’s speech, however, another merger pattern was present, in which laminal and apical fricatives merge in favour of the latter. Because of that, hypercorrections found in that text are hypothesised to be purely graphical. Using quantitative methods, the paper compares the patterns found in spellings found in the two texts in order to better understand merger processes involved (and especially hypercorrections), but also to reflect on the methodology which can be used to analyse such issues.

The contrast between apical and laminal articulations in Basque dento-alveolar sibilant consonants has traditionally attracted linguists’ attention. This distributedness distinction, as it has come to be known in the literature, was assumed to be very uncommon, a sort of typological oddity (perhaps the only one) of Basque consonantism, which, in all other respects, is not particularly remarkable in terms of its phonological characteristics. Many studies have been devoted to the articulatory and acoustic properties of sibilants in Standard Basque and several dialectal varieties. In this paper, written as a contribution to this well-deserved Festschrift in honor of José Ignacio Hualde, I compare the Basque system of sibilants and its features with other structurally more or less analogous systems, drawing on recent typological research, in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the alleged uniqueness of the Basque sibilants.

This paper reports on the development of L2 English vowel pair perception by adult L1 Spanish/Basque speakers of differing levels of English instruction. This study focuses on vowel pairs /i-ɪ/, /u-ʊ/ and /ʌ-ɔ/, with differing levels of proximity to native categories. Results of two perceptual tasks show that learners are influenced by their native categories, but that regardless of level, they can still modify their representations. However, the success in categorization varies by sound based on acoustic distance and multiple category competition.

In this paper I present an unusual Bantu tonal phenomenon where certain “cells” in the verb paradigm require a tonal agreement between the first syllable (the subject prefix) and the last syllable (an inflectional ending). Such a long-distance dependency raises the question of whether it is tone alone that can do this. I first provide an overview of the phenomenon in Ekegusii (Kenya), and then show that a relative construction in geographically and genetically distant Grassfields Bantu languages of Cameroon can help us understand both the nature and history of the more evolved situation seen in Ekegusii. I conclude that although initially surprising, initial/final tone agreement has a natural diachronic source and is not so crazy—even from a synchronic point of view.

In Chilean Spanish (Bros̀ 2018, 2019), s-aspiration is an opaque process in which [h], coda realization of /s/, surfaces morpheme internally as expected, but it overapplies in word-final prevocalic position; in absolute word-final position and in word-final preconsonantal position, deletion takes place instead. Bros̀ argues that a Stratal OT account is necessary to explain the data. Although the verdict is out on whether some degree of serialism is unavoidable in OT, this paper contends that a simpler, non-serial account of the Chilean data is preferrable to a Stratal OT one, due to greater simplicity and strict parallelism, which is more closely aligned with the spirit of OT. Additionally, the analysis presented shows that the Chilean data do not offer evidence in favor of a Stratal OT account, as a parallel explanation is possible. The proposed analysis contributes to our understanding of the Chilean data, to our knowledge of aspiration and other opaque phenomena in Spanish, and to the debate on parallelism in OT.