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The Kuki-Chin group of the Tibeto-Burman language family consists of upwards of 50 languages spoken mainly in western Myanmar, predominantly in Chin State and in neighboring areas of India and Bangladesh (Simons & Fennig (eds.). 2019. Ethnologue: Languages of the world, 21st edn. Dallas Texas: SIL International. Online version. http://www.ethnologue.com/). In the many daughter languages of Proto–Kuki-Chin, syllable structure simplification has yielded a synchronic situation in which individual languages are spread along a cline ranging from more conservative languages, some with complex onsets and vowel length distinctions, to more innovative languages, some with no coda consonants at all. The distribution and phonetic realization of these features vary across the Kuki-Chin group, raising a number of relevant questions about the underlying phonological representations of the Kuki-Chin syllable. This paper surveys representative structures from a variety of Kuki-Chin languages in order to highlight issues in syllable structure across these little-studied languages. In doing so, we aim to both unify observations on Kuki-Chin phonology related to the syllable, and to propose research that will further elucidate its structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Innovative verbs in Japanese are formed from nouns of various sources including loanwords, Sino-Japanese nouns, mimetics, and proper names. Regardless of their different origin, these innovative denominal verbs exhibit a collection of intriguing properties, ranging from phonological, morphological, to semantic and pragmatic. These properties are not strictly predictable from the component parts including the nature of the parent noun and verbal morphology. Such an unpredictable nature is suggestive of a constructional analysis. The form-meaning-function complex takes a templatic representation, which expresses the phonological and morphological characteristics, and associated with it are semantic and pragmatic properties. These phonological, morphological, semantic, and pragmatic properties combine to capture the nature of innovative denominal verbs as a construction. The analysis supports the idea of applying construction grammar to morphology along the lines of the developing field of construction morphology (e.g., Booij, Compounding and derivation: Evidence for construction morphology, John Benjamins, 2005, Construction morphology and the lexicon: 34-44, Cascadilla Press, 2007, Linguistische Berichte 19: 1-14, 2009a, Compounding and construction morphology, Oxford University Press, 2009b). We further show how insights from templatic (or prosodic) morphology (e.g., McCarthy and Prince, Prosodic morphology, University of Massachusetts and Brandeis University, 1986, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 8: 209-282, 1990) can be conceptualized in terms of construction grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Languages that have both aspirated stops and the phoneme /h/ often manifest a close parallel in their distribution. Previous work in phonology either has failed to recognize this close parallel or does not formally account for it. For example, American English witnesses a close parallel in the distribution of /h/ and aspirated stops that has largely gone unrecognized in the phonological literature. This paper oers a detailed optimality-theoretic analysis of the distribution of aspirated stops and /h/ for both American English and Korean. For each of these languages we delineate their distribution and show how an optimality-theoretic analysis can account for it. We develop an alignment analysis of their distribution that makes reference to constraints that require positions of prominence (such as word-initial or foot-initial position) to be aligned with the feature [spread glottis]. We further demonstrate how the alignment analysis predicts a typology of patterning of aspirated stops and /h/. Crucially, the typology does not predict that every language should have a close parallel in their distribution like American English, but as we show, it predicts a range of patterns that are instantiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]