Search

Copyright of Journal of African Languages & Linguistics is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Cross-linguistically, comparative-form adjectives (like English taller) are consistently derived from (or in many languages identical to) their positive-form counterparts (like English tall). This fact stands in tension with prevailing formal semantic treatments of gradable adjectives as degree relations that require extra semantic machinery not only for comparative predication but also for positive predication; for the latter, scholars typically posit a null morpheme or type-shift pos. In this short article, we review morphophonological evidence showing that in Arabic, comparative-form adjectives (like aTwal 'taller') are of equal complexity with their positive-form counterparts (like Tawiil 'tall'), both derived from a common tri-consonantal root (in this case $\sqrt{Twl}$ ), rather than one word being derived from the other. This raises the tantalizing possibility of Arabic becoming the first documented case of a language overtly realizing pos, with adjectives like Tawiil consisting of a degree-relation-denoting root and a pos-denoting template. We nonetheless conclude (albeit tentatively) that such an analysis is probably wrong, given (a) the idiosyncrasy in the phonological shape that the putative pos-denoting template takes across different adjectives, (b) the appearance of the same templatic shapes in non-adjectives, and (c) the appearance of adjectives like Tawiil in non- pos environments. We thereby uphold the generalization that no language realizes pos overtly. We close with a brief look at nominalized forms of gradable adjectives in Arabic and offer some preliminary remarks on the broader prospects of semantic de-composition for gradable adjectives, engaging with recent work on cross-linguistic variation in the grammar of property concepts. [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]