The Body as Evidence for the Nature of Language
Wendy Sandler
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004332
October 2018
Taking its cue from sign languages, this paper proposes that the recruitment and composition of body actions provide evidence for key properties of language and its emergence. Adopting the view that compositionality is the fundamental organizing property of language, we show first that actions of the hands, face, head, and torso in sign languages directly reflect linguistic components, and illuminate certain aspects of compositional organization among them that are relevant for all languages, signed and spoken. Studies of emerging sign languages strengthen the approach by showing that the gradual recruitment of bodily articulators for linguistic functions directly maps the way in which a new language increases in complexity and efficiency over time. While compositional communication is almost exclusively restricted to humans, it is not restricted to language. In the spontaneous, intense emotional displays of athletes, different emotional states are correlated with actions of particular face and body features and feature groupings. These findings indicate a much more ancient communicative compositional capacity, and support a paradigm that includes visible body actions in the quest for core linguistic properties and their origins.

Rising declaratives of the Quality-suspending kind
Matthijs Westera
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004330
November 2018
The theory of Intonational Compliance Marking (ICM) maintains that speakers of English use final rising intonation to indicate a suspension (potential violation) of a conversational maxim (­Westera 2013; 2014). This paper aims to show that a certain kind of rising declarative, one which has been prominent in the literature (e.g., Gunlogson 2008), can be adequately understood in ICM’s terms as involving a suspension of the maxim of Quality. By explicating certain minimal assumptions about pragmatics, this understanding accounts for three core features of such ­rising declaratives: their question-likeness, the speaker bias they express and their badness out of the blue. In a nutshell, their question-likeness is derived from principles of general co­operative discourse, their bias from the relative importance of the maxim of Quality, and their badness out of the blue from a competition between rising declaratives and interrogatives. The account is compared in detail to various existing accounts of rising declaratives of the relevant sort, highlighting explanatory and empirical differences.

Licensing of Vowel Length in Czech
Markéta Ziková
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004328
January 2018
This book presents a morphosyntactic account of vowel length in Contemporary Czech. The present approach is strictly decompositional on both the phonological and the morphosyntactic side. It assumes prosodic affixes in contemporary Czech. The focus is on prosodic affixes which realize morphosyntactic parts of diminutives and hypocoristics.

Problems of prosodic parallelism: A reply to Wiese and Speyer (2015)
Gerrit Kentner
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004326
September 2015
In their recent contribution, Wiese and Speyer (2015) come forward with a very interesting proposal regarding the effect of supra-lexical prosody on word prosodic structure. The proposal, the simplicity and elegance of which is captivating, is this: when given the choice, speakers strive for a rendition that maximizes prosodic parallelism; for two words that are prosodic phrase mates the foot structures are preferably parallel, i.e., the feet have the same number of syllables and stress pattern. This reply is a critical appraisal of Wiese and Speyer (2015).

No evidence for prosodic effects on the syntactic encoding of complement clauses in German
Gerrit Kentner, Isabelle Franz
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004325
November 2018
Does linguistic rhythm matter to syntax, and if so, what kinds of syntactic decisions are susceptible to rhythm? By means of two recall-based sentence production experiments and two corpus studies – one on spoken and one on written language – we investigated whether linguistic rhythm aff^Kects the choice between introduced and un-introduced complement clauses in German. Apart from the presence or absence of the complementiser dass (`that’), these two sentence types di^Kffer with respect to the position of the tensed verb (verb-^Lfinal/ verb-second). Against our predictions, that were based on previously reported rhythmic e^Kffects on the use of the optional complementiser `that’ in English, the experiments fail to obtain compelling evidence for rhythmic/prosodic influences on the structure of complement clauses in German. An overview of pertinent studies showing rhythmic influences on syntactic encoding suggests these eff^Kects to be generally restricted to syntactic domains smaller than a clause. We assume that, in the course of language production, initially, clause level syntactic projections are speci^Lfied; their specifi^Lcation is in fact the prerequisite for phonological encoding to start. Consequently, prosodic eff^Kects may only touch upon the lower level categories that are to be integrated into the clausal projection, but not upon the syntactic makeup of the higher order projection itself.

On the Distribution of Consonants and Vowels in Diss
yllabic Base Words in Contemporary Hawaiian
Nina Pilszczikowa-Chodak
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004319
October 2018
Analysis of 1595 dissyllabic Hawaiian base words revealed that they could be divided into three groups: one with initial voiceless ob
struents, one with initial voiced sonorants and one with words without an initial consonant. In all three groups the arrangements of
vowels and diphthongs showed the same nine word-patterns within the disyllabic base words of Hawaiian. These patterns are presented i
n Table 1. At the left edge of this table going down are letters: /‘,h,k,p,l.m.n.w/, and 0-zero/ marking the initial consonants or th
eir absence in words of these three groups. Each of these lines contains words with this initial consonant or C1 = O1. These lines: 4
lines of words with initial voiceless /‘,h,k,p/, then four lines of words with initial voiced sonorants: /l,m,n,w/ then, below, one
line of words without an initial consonant: C1 = O1. At the top of this Table 1 there are written the nine word-patterns of Ha
waiian. They are the foundation of this research. In this table short vowels of Pattern N 1 – 9 are marked by small letter v, long vo
wels are marked by capital letter V, while diphthongs are marked by VV. Patterns: 1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 v-v V-V VV-VV V-VV v-VV VV-v
VV-V v-V V-v C 1 k: 110 53 7 50 14 19 9 15
4 There are only 36 words with diphthongs in both syllables. This allows us to see more clearly the distribution of short
and long vowels, and diphthongs after each particular voiceless obstruent and voiced sonorant, and in words without an initial conso
nant. It immediately shows the prevalence of short vowels: 828, that is Pattern N1 as compared to the other 2 – 9 Patterns. T
able 2 shows the presence or absence of a consonant in the second syllable. Table 3 displays the words with diphthongs and shows th
e relationship between the first and second syllables. It also separates the diphthong /iu/ from other diphthongs. The diphthong /iu/ was found only in words with initial voiceless consonants. There are no cases of diphthong /iu/ appearing after initial sonorants of disyllabic base words. The Hawaiian sound system, which has only 8 consonants, contains a very intricate and complex distribution system of short, long vowels and diphthongs after the initial consonant (C1or O1), and within the first and second syllable of disyllabic base words. It also revealed the crucial interdependence of consonants and vowels, short, long and diphthongs, within the Hawaiian sound system.

Shu-hao Shih
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004311
October 2018
This dissertation proposes that schwa can be non-moraic (Kager 1989, 1990, Féry 1995, 1996), analogous to high vowels. In addition, such moraless schwas can head syllables (called ‘minor syllables’ after Matteson 1965, Lin 1993, 1997, 1998, Shaw 1994, Gafos 1998). Non-moraic, monomoraic, and bimoraic schwa can co-exist in the same phonological system. One of the major empirical consequences of this theory is that it accounts for stress systems in which stress avoids schwa. I go further in claiming that non-moraic schwa is the only means by which stress systems are sensitive to vowel quality, contra Kenstowicz (1997), de Lacy (2002, 2004, 2006), and others. I argue that non-moraic, monomoraic, and bimoraic schwa co-exist in Piuma Paiwan, an Austronesian language that has been reported to have sonority-sensitive stress (Chen 2009a, b, Yeh 2011). My fieldwork and experimental results provide acoustic evidence that stress avoids landing on a schwa. I argue that such avoidance is a side-effect of schwa’s prosodic status: schwa is usually non-moraic in Piuma Paiwan. However, schwa is required to be monomoraic when it appears in the non-head position of a foot, and bimoraic when it is forced to be in the head syllable of a foot. The different kinds of schwa have significantly distinct phonetic effects, particularly in duration and vowel quality variability. The theory proposed here predicts that stress should never avoid non-central vowels. One of the major challenges to this prediction is found in sonority-driven stress systems that seem to make peripheral vowel distinctions. However, I will present experimental evidence that the most discussed example of such a system – Gujarati – has been described incorrectly (cf. de Lacy 2004). Of the five types of phonetic evidence examined, only F1 provides clear evidence for stress, revealing stress to be consistently penultimate, and not sonority-driven. I will also show that many descriptions of putative sonority-driven stress lack robust phonetic and phonological evidence. Finally, I present an Optimality Theory factorial typology of constraints relating to schwa moraicity, and identify important rankings for grammars with various effects.

Sentence stress in presidential speeches
Arto Anttila, Timothy Dozat, Daniel Galbraith, Naomi Shapiro
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004303
October 2018
Sentential prominence is not represented in writing, it is hard to measure phonetically, and it is highly variable, yet it undoubtedly exists. Here we report preliminary findings from our study of sentential prominence in the inaugural addresses of six U.S. presidents. We confirm the familiar hypothesis that sentential prominence has two sources (Jespersen 1920): it is partly MECHANICAL and depends on syntax (Chomsky and Halle 1968, Liberman and Prince 1977, Cinque 1993) and partly MEANINGFUL in that it highlights informative material (Bolinger 1972). Both contribute independently to perceived prominence. Pursuing the view that sentential prominence is a matter of STRESS, we provide evidence for the linguistic reality of the Nuclear Stress Rule (Chomsky and Halle 1968) as well as the view that information coincides with stress peaks in good prose (Bolinger 1957). We also observe that part of speech matters to sentence stress: noun and adjective stresses are loud and mechanical; verb and function word stresses are soft and meaningful. We suggest that this may explain why parts of speech differ in word phonology as well.