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Lenition, or postvocalic weakening of obstruents, occurred in several languages in North Sea Germanic. Although the main centers of Germanic lenition lie outside this region, in High German and Danish, systemic lenition took place in Low German, North Frisian, and Dutch. Lenition in northern Low German is completely independent of lenition in High German, but the area does, however, border on Danish, which has the most far reaching of the Germanic lenitions. Lenition in mainland North Frisian is also in an area adjacent to Danish, but it displays a modified and rather unique form. In Dutch, there are only two small isolated areas with systemic lenition, one in Groningish and one in East Flemish. In general, lenition is attributed to the establishment of complementary length and the correlation of syllable cut in accented syllables. There are several convincing arguments to support this claim. Lenition is considered a Germanic trend, which is present only in its nascent form in other areas of West Germanic.

Este artigo discute a silabificação no Português do Príncipe (PP), variedade da língua portuguesa falada em Santo Antônio do Príncipe, em São Tomé e Príncipe. Focaremos, para tanto, na coda. Apresentamos, inicialmente, os templates silábicos do PP, indicando os segmentos licenciados nos diferentes constituintes da sílaba. Após isso, fazemos o levantamento de alguns processos fonológicos, cujo domínio é a coda. Com base em um corpus de fala espontânea, verificamos que a coda, no PP, pode ser preenchida, com múltiplas realizações fonéticas de um rótico /r/, uma sibilante /S/, uma lateral /l/ ou mesmo abarcar uma nasal subespecificada /N/, da mesma forma que é previsto para outras variedades do português como a brasileira e a europeia. Processos fonológicos que têm a coda como domínio de aplicação e as consoantes /r/, /S/ e /l/ como alvo também foram observados: apagamentos, velarização, vocalização e posteriorização. O levantamento de tais fenômenos, no PP, corrobora uma concepção hierárquica para tratamento da estrutura silábica do PP e indica a atuação de duas trajetórias gramaticais paradoxais: a prevalência de sílabas CV fomentada por apagamentos e lenição segmentais, em que sílabas fechadas se adaptam em sílabas abertas, e a emergência de estruturas silábicas complexas, promovidas pela ressilabificação de /S/.

This study compares prosodic structural effects on nasal (N) duration and coarticulatory vowel (V) nasalization in NV (Nasal-Vowel) and CVN (Consonant-Vowel-Nasal) sequences in Mandarin Chinese with those found in English and Korean. Focus-induced prominence effects show cross-linguistically applicable coarticulatory resistance that enhances the vowel's phonological features. Boundary effects on the initial NV reduced N's nasality without having a robust effect on V-nasalization, whose direction is comparable to that in English and Korean. Boundary effects on the final CVN showed language specificity of V-nasalization, which could be partly attributable to the ongoing sound change of coda nasal lenition in Mandarin.

Descriptions of Australian Aboriginal English list the neutralisation of the Standard English contrast between so-called voiced and voiceless stops as one characteristic feature. This paper reports on the results of an acoustic analysis of data collected in a production task by monolingual speakers of Standard Australian English in Sydney, of Aboriginal English on Croker Island, Northern Territory, and bilingual speakers of Iwaidja/Aboriginal English and Kunwinjku/Aboriginal English on Croker Island. The results show that average values for Voice Onset Time, the main correlate of the “stop voicing contrast” in English, and Closure Duration collected from Aboriginal speakers of English do not significantly differ from that of speakers of Standard Australian English, irrespective of language background. This result proves that the stop contrast is not neutralised by these Aboriginal speakers of English. However, it can be shown that phonetic voicing manifesting itself in Voice Termination Time is a prevalent and characteristic feature of Aboriginal English on Croker Island. This feature aligns Aboriginal English on Croker Island with local Aboriginal languages and differentiates it from Standard Australian English.

It is well-documented that coronal stops in English are most likely to undergo lenition when appearing in a prosodically weak position. Based on the data in the two corpora, this paper analyzes the patterns of coronal stop realizations across words in American English (AE) and British English (or Received Pronunciation (RP)). Results showed that coronal stops over a word boundary were subject to flapping, glottaling, nasal plosion and deletion. Coronal stops in AE, specifically those in superlative and derivational suffixes, were commonly deleted. Most coronal stops in RP, however, stayed unchanged across words. In addition, coronal stops in AE tended heavily to undergo flapping between vowels, but those in RP did not. The underlying voicing contrast also played a significant role in the variation where voiceless coronal stops often underwent glottaling whereas voiced counterparts did not in both AE and RP. Also, word frequency had an influence on such alternations in the sense that low-frequency words resisted weakening in both dialects.

This paper examines seven acoustic properties of /s/ in Chilean Spanish (CS) and Salvadoran Spanish (ES). Acoustic measurements from 36 speakers, balanced for gender and dialect, reveal several cross-dialectal differences: CS /s/ was significantly longer than ES /s/ in coda position and had a higher spectral center of gravity. Two findings were mitigated by gender: women in both dialects were more likely to voice /s/, but the magnitude of the difference in voicing between male and female speakers was greater in CS. There were no differences in relative intensity in CS, while in ES, /s/ used by males has significantly lower relative intensity than /s/ used by females. No dialect differences were found for variance, kurtosis, or skewness. While both CS and ES are frequently collocated under the umbrella of “/s/ weakening dialects,” our results show that tokens of non-deleted /s/ are acoustically distinct. These findings suggest that shorter duration and lower spectral energy in ES could be the result of a looser or backer constriction of /s/ and may have implications for work examining cross-dialectal differences in /s/ lenition at the phonetics/phonology interface.

The lateral approximant in General British English (GB) is realised as light when occurring in the onset (leaf), and as dark in the rhyme (help,feel,google). Non-prevocalic positions are typical contexts for lenition, analysed in Element Theory as decomposition in weak positions. However, it is unclear how velarisation can be characterised as element loss if light [l] is represented as |A I|, while dark [ɫ] is represented as |A U|. Therefore, I propose that laterals in GB contain both the coronal |I| and the velar |U| element underlyingly (in addition to |A|), but because these cannot combine in a compound segment in English, they are both floating. Their association at the phrase level is determined by the apophonic chain (Guerssel & Lowenstamm 1996), mapped onto the structure of the syllable: |I| is attracted to the prevocalic position, |A| to the vocalic position and |U| to the postvocalic position. Darkening thus does not involve lenition of /l/, but partial interpretation in all positions. In contrast, I analyse vocalisation of dark [ɫ] as lenition, involving loss of |A| in weak positions. I integrate the lateral into the system of glides in English, and establish a typology of its behaviour across different accents.

The previous studies that describe the phonological system of the isolects and the description of their differing and uniting linguistic features have not yet answered the doubts among Indonesian linguists whether or not the Proto of Sambori-Teta (PSm-Te) were descended from Proto Austronesia (PAn). Thus, this article aims to describe the interrelatedness of the two protoes and to describe the types of sound changes from the PAn to PSm-Te etymons. This descriptive study applied a comparative method by implementing bottom-up and top-down analysis in reconstructing the PSm-Te. The linguistic features as the evidence of the interrelatedness of the two protoes were identified and analyzed using sound change theories. This study found 1691 (99.35%) definitive etymons of PSm-Te among 1702 etymons of Sambori and Teta Isolects identified in this study, and the types of sound change from PAn to PSm-Te etymons showed addition, deletion, metathesis, diphthongization, fusion, fortition, lenition, fronting, and backing. The definitive PSm-Te and the identified types of sound changes can be used as the linguistic evidence to determine that PAn descend PSm-Te. Therefore Sambori and Teta isolects reflect PSm-Te.

Temaet for denne artikkelen er en liten gruppe dialekter der lenisering av p, t, k til b, d, g etter trykksterk vokal er begrenset til ord som hadde kort, trykksterk stavelse i norrønt. Disse dialektene finner vi ved kysten helt øst i Agder, nær grensen mot Telemark og ved den østlige isoglossen for den sørnorske leniseringen som rammet alle korte konsonanter, uavhengig av om vokalen foran var lang eller kort. Etter at kvantitetsomleggingen hadde forlenget de norrøne, korte rotstavelsene enten ved vokalforlenging eller konsonantgeminering, finner vi lenisering både etter lang og kort vokal i hovedområdet, og bare etter kort vokal i området denne artikkelen handler om. Haslum (2004) argumenterer for at den begrensede distribusjonen ut-gjør et reliktområde etter at lenisering etter lang vokal var blitt reversert. Dette lar seg ikke motbevise, men i denne artikkelen argumenterer jeg for at den mer begrensede leniseringen i øst muligens i stedet kan skyldes en spredningsprosess der lenisjon etter kort vokal spredde seg noe lenger enn den generaliserte prosessen. The topic of the paper is a small group of Norwegian dialects where lenition of p, t, k into b, d, g in intervocalic and word-final position is limited to words characterized by a monomoraic, stressed syllable in Old Norse. These dia-lects are spoken in the easternmost local communities in Agder county, at the eastern margin of the South-Norwegian lenition areas where lenition hit all short oral stops irrespective of preceding vowel length. After the quantity shift had made all stressed vowels bimoraic, with rimes being either VV or VC, the distribution of the lenited plosives are after both long and short vow-els (the main area) or after short vowels only (the eastern marginal area). Haslum (2004) argues that the limited distribution in the east ist the result of a reversal after long vowels only. While this cannot be refuted as a possi-bility, I argue below that it may also be the result of a two-stage process, whereby lenition after a short vowel has spread further than the generalized process. publishedVersion

International audience; Phonologization is a process whereby phonetic substance becomes phonological structure [1]. The process involves at least two steps: (i) a universal phonetic ('automatic') variation becomes a language-specific ('speaker-controlled') pattern, (ii) the language-specific pattern becomes a phonological ('structured') object. This paper will focus on the first step and ask the question of whether three universal phonetic variations of the laryngeal feature of word-final codas (final devoicing, voicelessness assimilation and voicing assimilation) are becoming language-specific patterns in two Romance languages, Romanian and French. Our results suggest that neutralization processes (final devoicing) might be beginning their phonologization process in both French and Romanian whereas assimilation processes (regressive assimilation of voicing and voicelessness) remain universal phonetic tendencies.

Culture is one of elements that affect a person's proficiency of foreign languages. Sundanese phonological structure is different from Arabic. Therefore, it is difficult for some Sundanese people to pronounce Arabic. For example, Sundanese tends to face difficulties in reciting the verses of the Holy Quran. The Holy Quran is the Muslims’ holy book that is written in Arabic. The recitation of the Holy Quran should be in accordance with the Arabic phonology. In fact, Some Sundanese make irregularities or interference during reciting the Suras (chapters) of the Holy Quran. This study aims to reveal the phonological interference experienced by Sundanese speakers in reciting the Sura Al-Fatiha of the Holy Quran. The data in this study covers the recitations of the Sura Al-Fatiha. The data is retrieved through observation, recording, and interviews with some Sundanese people that live around the UPI Campus. The study concludes that there are five phonological interference phenomena in the pronunciation of the Hijā’ī (Arabic Alphabet) during the recitation of Sura Al-Fatiha. They are lenition, sound reinforcement, unusual sound changes, the voice addition, and assimilation. Some factors cause such interferences. They cover the influence of the Sundanese vocabulary and Arab phonemes that do not exist in the phonology of the Sundanese language.

Este artigo analisa a lenição do tepe intervocálico em diversos estados do Brasil, buscando avaliar, acusticamente, a natureza gradiente ou abrupta do fenômeno. Adicionalmente, o artigo avalia o impacto da lenição do tepe intervocálico para as representações mentais. Observou-se que a lenição deste segmento ocorre entre falantes dos 12 estados do Brasil que foram analisados, evidenciando a lenição do tepe intervocálico como um fenômeno emergente e recorrente no Português Brasileiro. Quanto à implementação gradual ou abrupta da lenição do tepe, os resultados indicaram pela adequação da implementação gradiente. Resultados indicaram que a lenição implica em perda temporal gradual na palavra. Quanto ao impacto da lenição do tepe intervocálico para as representações mentais, evidências foram apresentadas para a relevância do detalhe fonético na implementação da lenição, corroborando princípios da Teoria de Exemplares.

High Prussian, a variety of East Central German, has a segmentally opaque process of final devoicing: Only some forms with underlyingly voiced obstruents devoice at the end of a word. This phenomenon can also be observed in some morphological alternations where simplex forms show final devoicing but complex ones do not. This paper provides a metrical analysis of final devoicing and two related phenomena: spirantization, and an interaction of vowel length in high vowels and obstruent voicing. It is claimed that nondevoicing items contain disyllabic foot templates and that word-final consonants are then syllabified as onsets of empty-headed word-final syllables. The analysis demonstrates how evidence from West Germanic dialects can contribute to our understanding of the phonology of laryngeal features and to the role that metrical structure can play in shaping phonological alternations.*

In Old English, Fricative Voicing and g-Spirantization fail to apply to geminates whereas Palatalization freely applies to geminates. Such difference in the applicability of phonological processes to geminates relies on the question whether the nature of a phonological process is lenition or not. On the basis of the observation that geminate consonants tend to resist lenition processes, the present paper proposes that geminate inalterability/alterability in Old English can be accounted for by specifying the distinction between singleton segments and geminate segments in relevant markedness constraints and thus restricting lenition processes to affecting short segments only.

The present study analyzes percentages of target-like production of Spanish spirantization and assimilation of coda nasals place of articulation, in three groups of bilingual children simultaneously acquiring German and Spanish: two very young groups, one living in Germany and another one in Spain, and a group of 7-year-old bilinguals from Germany. There were monolingual Spanish and monolingual German control groups. The comparison between groups shows that the Spanish of bilinguals is different from that of monolinguals; and the Spanish of bilinguals in Germany is different from that of bilinguals in Spain. Results lead to the conclusion that the Spanish competence of the bilinguals from Germany is still incomplete, and influenced by transfer of the majority language (German). Only bilingual children living in Germany show influence of the majority language onto the heritage language, whereas transfer does not operate on the Spanish competence of the bilingual children from Spain.

Building on Callender 2012, this paper argues that residue from the High German tenues shift may be the result of incomplete lexical diffusion (as opposed to later northern borrowing). Although unshifted forms rarely appear in OHG texts (see Braune 2004 [1886]), an examination of the TITUS corpus and Schützeichel 1995 revealed that their shifted counterparts were also largely absent. This suggests that these forms were simply not the types of words written in OHG texts. Incomplete lexical diffusion thus remains a plausible explanation. I also argue that affrication and spirantization may have been phonologically (perceptually) abrupt. Furthermore, there was little distinction between the two post-vocalically for old short stops, a position where affricates do not survive today.

This paper discusses coda lenition phenomena in Chilean Spanish, seeking to create a unified analysis for coda obstruent gliding and /s/-reduction. The paper invokes Moraic Theory to motivate lenition of certain segments in coda position. Using Harmonic Serialism, a serial variant of Optimality Theory, Chilean Spanish is shown to have a minimum sonority requirement on coda segments, and lenites insufficiently sonorous segments. /s/ is shown to place-delete to [h] to avoid sonority restrictions. The lack of /ʔ/ causes obstruents to diverge their derivation from that of /s/. Lenition to glottal segments is preferred, but gliding occurs if this is impossible.

There has been extraordinary attention devoted to the Celtic mutations over the years, with various authors arguing for phonological, morphological, or lexical treatments (and various blends thereof). Strikingly, this literature is virtually bereft of any mention of the phonological restrictions that can sometimes limit the applicability of mutation. In this article, we provide a detailed experimental and corpus-based investigation of the phonological restrictions on Scottish Gaelic mutation. Using both techniques, we show that the phonological restrictions are alive yet are in a state of flux. The continued productivity of these phonological aspects of the mutation system argues that any analysis of mutation must attend to them.

What causes Indonesian to lenite word-final /k/, American English to lenite word-final /t/, and Spanish to lenite word-final /s/? This article shows that all three observed lenition patterns can be motivated using a single principle: languages preferentially lenite segments that provide relatively low informativity compared to the amount of informativity those segments carry in other languages. In a comparison of a diverse sample of seven languages from the LDC CALLHOME and CALLFRIEND corpora, Indonesian /k/, American English /t/, and Spanish /s/ are found to have the lowest informativity, predicting that they would be more likely to be affected by sound change processes. In a subsequent regression-based corpus study, low informativity predicted the propensity of word-final lenition of all obstruents in American English after phonetic and phonological factors were controlled for. This article therefore provides a partial solution to the famous actuation problem (Weinreich et al. 1968) with respect to the actuation of lenition processes.

One of the more characteristic features of Spanish is the process of articulatory reduction, known as spirantization, which affects the voiced stops /b,d,g/ resulting in the voiced approximants [β̞, ð̞, ɣ̞]. While studies have shown variation with respect to the phonetic environments in which /b,d,g/ undergo spirantization, the general consensus has been that they are always realized as approximants between vowels in most varieties of Spanish. Likewise, several studies have found that spirantization relates to different social factors in different varieties of Spanish. However, these studies have been impressionistic and/or qualitative in their analyses of the voiced obstruents and have not examined the varying degrees to which intervocalic /b,d,g/ spirantize. The current study analyzes more than 4,500 tokens of intervocalic /b,d,g/ from the spontaneous speech of 31 speakers from the province of Concepción, Chile. Likewise, the present paper examines and compares the phonetic behavior of traditional intervocalic /b,d,g/ with that of /b,d,g/ in non-traditional intervocalic contexts created by /s/ elision. Results indicated that both linguistic and social factors had an influence on the degree to which speakers realized [β̞, ð̞, ɣ̞], and that while speakers still lenite and delete /b,d,g/ in non-traditional intervocalic environments created by /s/ elision, generally they do so at a much lower rate than when in traditional intervocalic contexts.

This paper highlights a hitherto unreported change in progress among northern speakers of British English, with increasing post-nasal [ɡ]-presence in words like 'sing' or 'wrong' pre-pausally. The factors that condition this innovation are unclear due to collinearity between various boundary phenomena. The right edge of phrasal prosodic categories may be associated with boundary tones, final lengthening, and pause; consequently, the variable presence of [ɡ] appears to be affected by prosodic boundary strength, segmental duration, and the presence and duration of a following pause. These factors are teased apart through analysis of an elicitation task from 30 northern speakers, which reveals that [ŋɡ] clusters are conditioned most strongly by pause. Post-nasal [ɡ]-presence is only licensed when the following consonant-initial word is temporally distant, showing only minimal sensitivity to prosodic boundaries directly. The surface effect of segmental duration arises only indirectly through its collinearity with pause duration. Current theoretical approaches to external sandhi emphasize a range of different factors, including phonological representations of prosodic constituency, phonetic parameters like segmental duration, and psycholinguistic mechanisms of production planning. This paper provides quantitative evidence from an under-reported feature of northern English that bears directly on these debates.

Introduction Julia Herschensohn.- Part I Romance Syntax.- Classifier Phrase as Host for Stage-level Spanish Adnominal Participial Adjectives Karen Zagona and Heles Contreras.- The Syntax of Mirative Focus Fronting: Evidence from French J.-Marc Authier and Liliane Haegeman.- Further Implications of French Devoir and Falloir for Theories of Control and Modality Lisa A. Reed.- Part II Language Variation in Romance.- Theoretical and Practical Arguments for a Language Feature: Evidence From Language Mixing Barbara E. Bullock & Almeida Jacqueline Toribio.- On the Reduction of / / in a Minority North American Variety of French Randall Gess Why Lenition Interactions are Typically Counter-feeding Haike Jacobs.- The French Jespersen's Cycle and Negative Concord Marie Labelle.- Part III Diachronic Romance Studies.- The Variable Position of Initial Subordinate clauses in Old French: arguments Against a semantic account Bryan Donaldson.- Obviation and Old French Subjunctive Clauses Deborah Arteaga.- On the varying fortunes of darla and darlo in Italian Cinzia Russi.- Conclusion Julia Herschensohn

Danish, like closely related Swedish and Norwegian, has descended from Old Norse (Haugen 1976). While the three contemporary languages are variably mutually intelligible, Danish has phonologically diverged from the other Scandinavian languages (Gooskens 2006). This is caused by extensive consonant lenition and vowel reduction within Danish (Basbøll 2005). The lenition of and in syllable coda positions into a sound that Danish linguists have called soft-d is seemingly unique to the Danish. In most phonological descriptions, it is transcribed using the phonetic symbol /ð/, a voiced interdental fricative. We assert that this is not accurate; not all phonologists agree that the soft-d is a fricative. Some describe it as an alveolar semi-vowel (Haberland 1994), while others transcribe it as a velarized, retracted, and lowered alveolar approximant (Basbøll 2005). Many observe that the sound resembles lateral /l/, a distinct phoneme of Danish (Wells, 2010). Through acoustic analysis of tokens taken from the DanPASS corpus (Grønnum 2016) we show that the acoustic properties (HNR) of soft-d are indeed not the same as a fricative, but rather that of an approximant or vowel. Therefore, the use of /ð/ to transcribe this symbol is inaccurate and does not align with the goals of the International Phonetic Association.

This study investigates voiceless stop lenition in Chilean Spanish. Recent studies (e.g. Pérez 2007, Figueroa & Evans 2014 among others) have documented high levels of lenition of /bdg/ in Chilean Spanish. As a result, the present study seeks to document the degree to which the voiceless stops /ptk/ undergo lenition in this variety of Spanish. Furthermore, the relationship between lenition and social factors (e.g., age, gender, and socioeconomic stratification) is examined. Data was taken from the sociolinguistic interviews of 32 speakers from the Province of Concepción, Chile. In all, 4,419 intervocalic tokens of /ptk/ were analyzed for lenition using three different measurement criteria: total voicing, articulatory reduction, and duration. Results confirm that, according to all three criteria, elevated levels of lenition are observed in the production of /ptk/ in Concepción. Likewise, results indicate that as a social phenomenon, voiceless stop lenition in Concepcion is primarily conditioned by age and gender.

The processes of gemination, lenition, and vowel lengthening are central to the study of phonology, as they reveal much about the treatment of quantity in a given language. Using data from older language stages, modern dialects and standard languages, this study examines the interdependence of vowel and consonant quantity in the history of the Germanic branch of Indo-European. Kurt Goblirsch focusses on the various geminations in Old Germanic languages (West Germanic gemination, glide strengthening, and expressive gemination), open syllable lengthening in German, Dutch, Frisian, English, and Scandinavian languages, and the major lenitions in High German, Low German, and Danish, as well as minor lenitions in Bavarian, Franconian, and Frisian dialects. All of these changes are related to the development of the Germanic languages from distinctive segmental length to complementary length to syllable cut. The discussion challenges traditional theoretical assumptions about quantity change in Germanic languages to argue for a new account whereby, gemination, lenition, and vowel lengthening are interrelated.

According to the modular feedforward architecture of grammar, the phonetics is sensitive only to the output of the phonology and is thus blind to morphological or lexical conditioning (Pierrehumbert 2002). However, this prediction is challenged by claims that fine-grained phonetic detail may display paradigm uniformity (PU) effects (Steriade 2000). In the present study I search for phonetic PU effects in vowel nasalisation in Scottish Gaelic by investigating alternating items in which a nasalising environment is removed by a morpho(phono)logical process known as lenition, which replaces initial [m] with [v] under certain morphosyntactic conditions.In vowels following initial [m], a clear distinction is found between (i) categorical phonological nasalisation, which may be subject to lexically conditioned blocking and which displays overapplication in lenited forms, and (ii) gradient phonetic nasalisation, which applies in those items where categorical phonological nasalisation fails to occur and which disappears completely in lenited forms. The differing patterns displayed by these two types of nasalisation fit neatly with the predictions of a modular architecture, in which categorical phonology has direct access to morphological information but gradient phonetics does not, and I conclude that non-modular architectures such as Exemplar Theory are not the correct explanation for putative PU effects.

From Latin to Spanish and Portuguese, the natural class of sonorant consonants – laterals, rhotics, and nasals – often underwent drastic phonological changes. It is noteworthy that the tendency toward dissimilation, in accordance with Dispersion Theory (Flemming 1996; 1997; 2006), effected opposite changes in intervocalic /l/ and /n/. Portuguese favored geminate simplification and singleton lenition (Lief 2006; Malkiel & Alessandri Teixeira 1985), whereas Spanish tended toward geminate palatalization and singleton retention (Lloyd 1987). This study is an expansion of Holt (2007) and presents a diachronic and contrastive analysis of the evolution of intervocalic /l lː n nː/ from Latin to Spanish and Portuguese.

Westphalian German Spirantization refers to the change from an original prevocalic long vowel to the corresponding short vowel plus fricative (i.e. [ɣ]). For example, the [ɪɣ] sequence in the Westphalian word [klɪɣə] “bran” derived historically from [iː]. The present article offers a new treatment for the historical shift from [iː] to [ɪɣ] — as well as similar ones involving other vowels — which breaks the process down into five separate changes. It is argued that each of these changes modified non-linear representations involving syllables, moras and segmental features. A crucial component of the proposed analysis is that each of the five changes is seen as a repair to a constraint.

This paper examines children's use of verbal agreement in comprehension in two varieties of Spanish with the goal of determining how the input affects their behavior. Both dialects are identical in allowing null subjects and having rich verbal morphology in contrast to English. The dialects differ however in that in Chilean Spanish a phonological lenition process affects the realization of second person singular /-s/. In Mexican Spanish, no such variation is found for the second singular. The results indicate that children acquiring languages with rich verbal morphology use agreement in comprehension in much the same way as children acquiring a language with less robust agreement. Moreover, we find that variable input for the second singular marker affects acquisition.

This paper examines the acquisition of the variable rules constraining Spanish syllable-final /s/-lenition in Chilean Spanish–speaking children, and whether adult-to-adult speech differs from child-directed speech in the production of s-lenition. The data of 10 children (ages 2;04–5;09) and their caregivers is presented. Tokens of syllable final /s/ were coded for pronunciation and a variable-rule analysis examining the effect of various linguistic and extralinguistic constraints was carried out. The results show that child and caregiver use of s-lenition is similar to that found in adult-to-adult speech; however, two of the youngest children showed near-categorical behavior. This paper highlights the important role of caregiver input on acquisition of s-lenition and proposes that production of s-lenition in utterance-final position in the input (caregiver's speech) is linked to young children's acquisition of s-lenition; young children exposed to an input with high rates of [s] in utterance-final position acquire s-lenition earlier.

This paper examines the phonological features that characterize the Amharic variety spoken in South Wəllo, an area which has been influenced by the diffusion of linguistic and cultural features arising from longstanding contact situations between Semitic and non-Semitic linguistic groups. Data from eight districts of the zone have shown that the South Wəllo variety has 26 consonant and seven vowel phonemes. The consonants are four fewer than that reported of the standard variety. The co-occurrence restrictions of the consonants and the syllable structures are the same as those of the standard variety. However, the phonological rules that operate at morpheme internal, morpheme and word boundary levels are different in the degree of complexity and directionality. These include inter-vocalic lenition of velar stops, word-final weakening of alveo-palatals, coalescence of lowering diphthongs, centering, lowering and fronting of vowels, metathesis of coronals and anteriors, and lexeme specific alternations of homorganic consonants. The description of the facts provides more substantive arguments in favor of the long-held claim that Wəllo constitutes a distinct dialect area.

In this study, we investigate whether diachronic lenition is a factor in the previously found asymmetry in intelligibility between Danish and Swedish. Due to the historical process of consonantal lenition in Danish, the aspiration distinction between intervocalic, originally long, stops has disappeared. In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that the absence of this distinction in Danish but not in Swedish results in better comprehension of Swedish intervocalic stops by Danish listeners than of Danish intervocalic stops by Swedish listeners. Our production experiment confirmed, not surprisingly, that there is no contrast for intervocalic stops in Danish, whereas there is one in Swedish. However, our perception experiment revealed that Danish listeners were not better in their perception of words with Swedish intervocalic stops than Swedish listeners were in their perception of words with Danish intervocalic stops. Contrary to the expectations of exemplar dynamics, in cross-language perception listeners did not always use their native categories in their perception of sounds of the non-native language and sometimes adjusted their native segment category boundaries to the values of the non-native language.

The paper deals with the areal-typological profiling of Ukrainian among languages of Europe, constituting Standard Average European (SAE) and especially Central European (CE). Placed recently in the context of the ‘areal typology’ and the ‘dynamic taxonomy’, Ukrainian together with Russian and Belarusian appear to be mere replica languages. Such languages are capable of only borrowing surface structures migrating all over the Europe unie or imitating deep structures on the model of SAE or CE. In order to elaborate on an alternative profiling of Ukrainian among languages of (Central) Europe, the author concentrates on both phonological and morphosyntactic features treated commonly as CE Sprachbund-forming (the spirantization of *g, the dispalatalization of the palatalized consonants, the existence of medial l, the umlauting, the three-tense system, including a simple preterit from the perfect, and the periphrastic ‘ingressive’ future). As a result, the author advances another vector of areal classification, thus positioning Russian in the core of ‘Standard Average Indo-European’ and (Southwest) Ukrainian as an intermediate language between Russian and the rest of (Central) European languages.

There is a wide array of spellings attested in Middle English for initial OEhw- in words such aswhen, where, what, who, which. Those beginning with ‘q’, found mostly in the North (including Scotland) and Northeast Midlands, have long been the subject of scholarly debate. The consensus is that they represented an articulation stronger than [hw], usually assumed to be [xw]. Just a handful of scholars have suggested that the articulation could have been [kw], but there is so far little detailed argument for this position. We propose thatat least a subsetof reflexes of OEhw- words cameat least variablyto be pronounced with initial [kw]. We suggest that this strengthened pronunciation existed alongside [xw], and lenited [hw] and [w], as well as simple [h] with the [w] deleted. We link (as some other scholars have) the history of these spellings with that of northern lenition of original initial [kw] to [xw]/[hw]/[w]. We approach the problem from a strongly variationist perspective, presenting (in accompanying appendices) detailed information on the ‘q’ spellings accessible from LAEME and eLALME. We review all the data, from the earliest attested forms through to modern dialect surveys, including place-name evidence, and we assess previous arguments on the topic.

This paper reports results from a production experiment examining the patterns of variation in the morphophonemic alternations present in spirantization in Modern Hebrew, a phenomenon to which there are many exceptions and diverse levels of variation. Real and nonce verbs were used to elicit variation in a sentence completion task as a follow-up to a perception experiment (Temkin Martínez 2010) which found gradient levels of acceptability in variation due to the presence of exceptionality. The diverse patterns of variation indicate that not all exceptions affect the same level of variation in alternation. Results of the current study suggest that levels of gradience are linked to the presence or absence of multiple orthographic representations for each of the segments involved. An Optimality Theoretic (OT) account modifying a combined model of set-indexation (Pater 2000) and Stochastic OT (Boersma 1998; Boersma & Hayes 2001; Hayes & Londe 2006; Hayes & MacEachern 1998; Zuraw 2000) presented in Temkin Martínez (2010) is provided to account for the alternation patterns in nonce verbs.

The present article examines the effect of variable input on the acquisition of plural morphology in two varieties of Spanish: Chilean Spanish, where the plural marker is sometimes omitted due to a phonological process of syllable final /s/ lenition, and Mexican Spanish (of Mexico City), with no such lenition process. The goal of the study is to determine whether variable input for grammatical morphology affects the acquisition process. Does the ambiguous nature (sometimes present and sometimes absent) of a form affect acquisition? To address this question, Experiment 1 examines the production of the plural marker in Chilean- and Mexican Spanish-speaking children, and Experiments 2 and 3 examine children's use of plural and singular indefinite noun phrases in comprehension. The results indicate that variable input affects acquisition, with Chilean children taking longer to acquire the plural marker than Mexican children.

The basic types of lenition environments (‘initial’, ‘intervocalic’, ‘final’) need to be separately evaluated as they differ along parameters like word position (e.g., pre-consonantal vs. final codas) or stress relations. This paper argues that we need to recognise an additional such parameter: the length of the vowel preceding an intervocalic consonant. We show that a number of phenomena from varieties of English and German show lenition patterns which draw a distinction between reflexes found in post-short (vc) and post-long (vvc) environments. The theoretical consequence of our observations is that phonological theory needs to be able to account for the post-short vs. post-long distinction in the form of a parametrically-determined representational difference.

This paper reports on a phonetic and phonological study of /t/-affrication in spontaneous British English Received Pronunciation. The study is motivated by the uncertainty surrounding plosive affrication in the literature on lenition and fortition. We suggest that a decision as to the status of a given pattern involving affrication in terms of lenition or fortition should be based on thorough phonetic and phonological analysis. We present a phonetic and phonological account of /t/-affrication, which takes into consideration the temporal and spectral characteristics of the sounds involved, as well as their distribution across phonological environments. Crucially, we compare affricated instances of /t/ with aspirated and fricated ones in the same dataset – the former arguably unmarked in this variety, the latter uncontroversially the result of lenition. We argue that the phonetic and phonological characteristics of /t/-affrication presented in this paper are consistent with an account in terms of fortition rather than lenition.

The paper investigates the problem of phonological strength relations that account for the organization of speech sounds in a specific fashion in the light of spirantization process as attested in the Assamese language, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the northeastern part of India. In Assamese aspirated stops /p?/ and /b?/ are spirantized as [f] and [v] in word-final position, leaving the unaspirated stops intact. In word-initial and medial positions spirantization is blocked in Assamese. De-aspiration in Assamese does not apply to word final position when no following consonant occurs. In Assamese, coda is de-aspirated when it is followed by an aspirated onset. However the fricatives /f/ and /v/ never lose their feature [+asp] despite the fact that both consonants occur in the word-final position or in coda position, being followed by aspirated onset. They turn in to /p?/ and /b?/ respectively when they are followed by obstruents. Nevertheless, the feature [+asp] is maintained in the onset position which does not undergo alternation. Distribution of Assamese aspirated phonemes at word boundary inform us that only the labial stops spirantize at the word-final position unlike coronal and velar stops which are not susceptible to the process of spirantization.

Are palatal consonants articulated by multiple tongue gestures (coronal and dorsal) or by a single gesture that brings the tongue into contact with the palate at several places of articulation? The lenition of palatal consonants (resulting in approximants) has been presented as evidence that palatals are simple, not complex: When reduced, they do not lose their coronal gesture and become dorsals; instead, they manifest reduced linguopalatal contact while retaining their anterior place of articulation. The frequently-reported deocclusivization of the Brazilian Portuguese (BP) palatal nasal may support this claim. However, the linguopalatal configuration of this sound has not been studied directly. Electropalatographic evidence from three speakers of BP (compared with data from three speakers of Peninsular Spanish) demonstrates that the palatal nasal is frequently realized as an approximant. There is no evidence of anterior occlusion in BP’s post-palatal, lenited nasal. Under conditions of focus/hyperarticulation, there is no evidence of stronger/more anterior occlusion. We argue that the articulatory target of the BP palatal nasal is neither occluded nor anterior.

This paper provides evidence for the activity of the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) as a constraint on dynamic alternations in the synchronic grammar of Qatari Arabic. It shows that the OCP is subject to proximity and to a gradient similarity effect. In Qatari Arabic, there are two variable phonological alternations that interact with the OCP, affrication and lenition. The velar stops /[inline-graphic 01i]/ and /k/ affricate to [ʤ] and [ʧ], respectively, when adjacent to [i(:)]. However, affrication is blocked when the outcome includes a sequence of segments that are highly similar. Lenition applies variably to the phoneme /ʤ/, which surfaces as [ʤ] or [j]. Usually, the probability of lenition applying to its eligible candidates is around the level of chance. The process, however, applies categorically when a violation of the OCP would otherwise be incurred. The data are analyzed within the framework of Optimality Theory. Abstract: Cet article presente des preuves de l’activite du Principe du contour obligatoire (PCO) comme contrainte sur les alternances dynamiques dans la grammaire synchronique de l’arabe qatari. L’article montre que le PCO est sujet a la proximite et a un effet variable de similarite. Dans l’arabe qatari, il y a deux alternances phonologiques variables qui interagissent avec le PCO : l’affrication et la lenition. Les occlusives velaires /[inline-graphic 01i]/ et /k/ subissent l’affrication devenant [ʤ] and [ʧ] respectivement lorsqu’elles sont adjacentes a [i(:)]. Cependant, l’affrication est bloquee lorsque le resultat comporte une sequence de segments tres similaires. La lenition s’applique de maniere variable au phoneme /ʤ/, donnant [ʤ] ou [j]. D’habitude la probabilite que la lenition s’applique aux candidats susceptibles de subir la lenition est au niveau du hasard. Le processus, cependant, s’applique de maniere categorique dans le cas ou une violation du PCO en resulterait. Les donnees sont analysees dans le cadre de la Theorie de l’Optimalite.

In the Kiel German regional variety (KG), /ɡ/ undergoes spirantization after vowels and /ʀ/ but not after /l/. KG contrasts with data provided by Wiese (1996) for a dialect that he calls Northern Colloquial Speech (NCS), in which /ɡ/ spirantizes not only after vowels and /ʀ/, but also after /l/. I argue that G-Spirantization in both regional varieties is an example of an assimilation which spreads [+continuant] from a vowel or /ʀ/ in KG (and /l/ in NCS) to a following coda /ɡ/. The difference between the /…lɡ/ environment in the two dialects can be explained by lateral ambivalence, as described in detail by Mielke (2005).*

It is not easy by any means to obtain prosodic information from documents written in ancient languages because it is not usually recorded therein. But the techniques of philology and linguistics sometimes enable us to derive prosodic evidence from written data. The two lenition rules in Proto-Anatolian, which were considered to have operated either after an accented long vowel or between two short vowels, have been unified by Adiego into a single rule in moraic terms: lenition occurred after an unaccented mora. Furthermore, Hittite mediopassive present verbs of the nasal-infix class, which cannot be adequately accounted for on the supposition that the basic units which carried accents in Proto-Anatolian were syllables, come to receive a well-motivated (both morphologically and typologically) and straightforward historical explanation from a moraic point of view. These two independent pieces of evidence inevitably lead us to argue that Proto-Anatolian was a mora-based language.

This paper intends to illustrate an analysis about one of the common phonological process known as spirantization in Amharic in the framework of Optimality and Feature Geometry. The theoretical models we have been assuming - known as the linear theory of representation-was quite successful in explaining a number of facts about sound systems. A defining characteristic of the theory is the view that segments are matrices of feature values, where every segment has a specification for each of the two dozen distinctive features. There were, however, phonological realms which the theory had largely ignored, and that were spirintization and assimilation. The process of these phonological processes in Amharic language can be shown and represented in Optimality Theory and Feature Geometry more clearly than in linear phonology. The method used in this research is analytical-descriptive. Six native speakers who were selected from different age groups that ranges from 30 to 50 and different educational levels were interviewed. Furthermore, free conversation and life stories were also included in the corpus. The data gathered is phonemically transcribed following the IPA conventions as revised to 2005 and analyzed using Optimality and Feature Geometry. Amharic, which is one of the most important languages of Ethiopia, is mainly spoken in Amhara regional state of Ethiopia. The language belongs to Transversal South-Ethio-Semitic group of the Afro-Asiatic language phylum. According to the 2007 Population Census, Census (2008) report, there are around 22 million Amharic native speakers and additional 7 million second language speakers. The language spoken in this region can be divided into four general regional dialects. The investigation of the major dialectal variations and isoglosses of Amharic are scanty. The available literature identifies four major dialects of Amharic: Gojjam, Gonder, Shewa and Wollo. Although the isoglosses and internal dialectal variations are hitherto not clearly established, the literature agrees on the mutual intelligibility among the dialects of this language. In Amharic, there are two consonants which engage in spirantization process. These consonants include /b, k / which are changed to the fricatives. Lenition patterns are expressed in terms of conflicts between the effort minimization constraint, LAZY, and on the other hand a class of lenition-blocking constraints. Spirantization, for example, is analyzed in terms of rankings where LAZY dominates IDENT (x). Under the opposite ranking, spirantization is blocked. There are three major feature groups, laryngeal features, manner features and place features, which Clements calls Class Nodes. In spirantization process, in the manner node, the feature (continuant) is added to a stop consonant, producing a fricative at the same place.

In Mexico City Spanish, plural morphology is always overtly realized but in Chilean Spanish, due to a lenition process that targets syllable-final [s], plural morphology is not always realized, and the conditions of overt realization of plural morphology are subject to both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. In this paper we show that variability in the input for grammatical morphology causes the performance of Chilean and Mexican children to differ from each other and from the adult control groups in production and comprehension tasks in ways that correlate with the reliability of plural marking in the input. Our results support Yang (2002)’s proposal that variability in the input does cause some children to assume a different grammar from the adult.

This study is an acoustic–phonetic examination of variation in Australian English consonant production. Group and individual patterns in the rates of frication of the voiceless plosives /p t k/ in Australian English are investigated. Previous studies on voiceless plosive production in Australian English have focussed primarily on /t/, and these analyses have largely been auditory in nature. Further, whereas previous studies have focussed on describing sociophonetic variation within Australian English, this study investigates speaker-specific variation. An analysis of twin speech, produced by young adult male speakers from Melbourne, is presented. The speakers are three identical twin pairs and one non-identical twin pair. The reason for studying twins, and identical twins in particular, is to explore the degree of phonetic difference between pairs of individuals who, theoretically, are as anatomically similar as possible and whose educational levels and home lives have been relatively the same. The speake...

Previous work on the acoustic discrimination of fricative contrasts has commonly studied categories which are not held to vary phonemically; instead the focus is placed on accounting for variation in the salience of the mapping between acoustic information and phonemic categories. The present study addresses a set of contrasts – the posterior obstruents /x, ɦ, kh/ in Assamese – where /ɦ/ fortition and /kh/ lenition processes interact with the identifiability of the velar fricative differentially according to positional and speaker characteristics. A series of principal components logistic regression models were applied at cumulative time windows over consonant and vowel intervals in words produced by Assamese speakers from Jorhat and Nalbari districts to model the system as a function of these potential conditioning factors. The velar-glottal model was found to reduce significantly in accuracy when applied to Jorhat female data relative to Jorhat/Nalbari male data (71% as compared with 90) as well as rela...