An in-depth analysis of the problems of learning a second language as experienced by a family of learners. This is a study of the phonological development of a group of L2 English learners. It is the first full-length book that focuses on a tightly-knit group of learners' acquisition of phonology over a period of years, and the first book to study both social and linguistic factors across that time period. Jette Hansen analyses this data gathered from actual language learners in terms of recent theory, as well as challenging aspects of current thinking on the subject of second language acquisition. Acquiring a Non-Native Phonology therefore makes an important and original contribution to the field, and provides an in-depth analysis and discussion of the developmental processes in acquiring a non-native sound system which has not previously been presented. The book is aimed at academics interested in second language acquisition, and researchers studying phonology in general.

This volume advances our understanding of how word structure in terms of affix ordering is organized in the languages of the world. A central issue in linguistic theory, affix ordering receives much attention amongst the research community, though most studies deal with only one language. By contrast, the majority of the chapters in this volume consider more than one language and provide data from typologically diverse languages, some of which are examined for the first time. Many chapters focus on cases of affix ordering that challenge linguistic theory with such phenomena as affix repetition and variable ordering, both of which are shown to be neither rare nor typical only of lesser-studied languages with unstable grammatical organization, as previously assumed. The book also offers an explicit discussion on the non-existence of phonological affix ordering, with a focus on mobile affixation, and one on the emergence of affix ordering in child language, the first of its kind in the literature. Repetitive operations, undesirable in many theories, are frequent in early child language and seem to serve as trainings for morphological decomposition and affix stacking. Thus, the volume also raises important questions regarding the general architecture of grammar and the nature and side effects of our theoretical assumptions.

In the 1990's, the focus of phonological studies has changed from rule-based analysis to constraint-based analysis. The study of Chinese phonology has also undergone such a change, as have other area studies in Generative Phonology. Why and how this change has occurred, the difference between the two kinds of analyses, and what has really happened in phonology after the change are the primary concerns of linguists and anyone interested in the study of Generative Phonology or other area studies in Generative Linguistics. To answer these questions, one must: (1) review the developing process of the change, (2) compare the two kinds of analyses in terms of their different frameworks and research focuses, and (3) profile the studies in phonology (in any area studies) in recent years.
Chinese Phonology in Generative Grammar is intended to offer such a review and comparison while outlining the studies in Chinese phonology.
Eight unpublished papers written by seven authors are selected to cover the areas of field-work, dialectology, and synchronic studies of segmental and tonal systems of the Chinese language family. These papers are directly related to the theoretical issues in: (1) The SPE Model; (2) Lexical Phonology and Morphology; (3) Autosegmental Phonology; (4) Metrical Phonology; and (5) Optimality Theory.
By putting the study of Chinese phonology into the generative perspective, this collection provides useful data for further theoretical work and draw significant feedback to the theory of Generative Phonology.
Key Features
* Review the theoretical development from rule-based analysis to constraint-based analysis in the study of Generative Phonology over the lastthree decades
* Compare the two kinds of analyses with respect to their different frameworks and research focuses and their relations with each other in Generative Phonology
* Profile the study of Chinese phonology in recent years by putting it into the generative perspective

SELF IMPROVEMENTWhat do getting a job, earning a promotion, making the right friends, and boosting your confidence all have in common? Doing each one of those things is a whole lot easier when you can speak and write without making grammatical mistakes. Just ask any hiring manager, senior-level executive, or neighbor next door.In this guide, author Patricia Blaine, a longtime professional writer, gives you the tools you need to write and speak effectively. You can learn how to - avoid common mistakes in verbal and written communications; - speak clearly--even practice with tongue twisters; - master the usage of pronouns, prepositions, and basic punctuation; - finally master correlative conjunctions; - organize an effective resume and cover letter; and - boost your overall vocabulary.By using everyday examples of proper and improper usage, Blaine makes it clear which words and cliches to avoid. Start putting your words to work for you, and beat your competitors seeking jobs, promotions, and advantages in everyday life with the practical advice in Change Your Words, Change Your Worth.

From a synchronic point of view, the various accentuation systems found in the Baltic and Slavic languages differ considerably from each other. We find languages with free accent and languages with fixed accent, languages with and without syllabic tones, and languages with and without a distinction between short and long vowels. Yet despite the apparent diversity in the attested Baltic and Slavic languages, the sources from which these languages have developed - the reconstructed languages referred to as Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic respectively - seem to have had very similar accentuation systems. The prehistory and development of the Baltic and Slavic accentuation systems is the main topic of this book, which contains sixteen articles on Baltic and Slavic accentology written by some of the world's leading specialists in this field.

Thomas Berg challenges context-free theories of linguistics; he is concerned with the way the term 'explanation' is typically used in the discipline. He argues that real explanations cannot emerge from a view which asserts the autonomy of language, but only from an approach which seeks to establish a connection between language and the contexts in which it is embedded. The author examines the psychological context in detail. He uses an interactiveactivation model of language processing to derive predictions about synchronic linguistic patterns, the course of linguistic change, and the structure of poetic rhymes. The majority of these predictions are borne out, leading the author to conclude that the structure of language is shaped by the properties of the mechanism which puts it to use, and that psycholinguistics thus qualifies as one likely approach from which to derive an explanation of linguistic structure.

This book is a general introduction to the structures of the different medieval Romance vernaculars most commonly known as Old or Medieval Spanish, as preserved in texts from Spain from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. After discussing general methodological questions concerning the description and analysis of an earlier historical stage of a modern language, the individual chapters in the first part of the book describe the orthography, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary of medieval Hispano-Romance. Steven N. Dworkin offers the first systematic description of the language in English, and compares its structures with those found in the modern variety. In the second part of the book, the features of medieval Hispano-Romance are exemplified in an anthology of selected texts, one from each of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, accompanied by linguistic commentary. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of Romance linguistics, Spanish historical linguistics, and Spanish medieval literary and cultural studies.

This new interpretation of the early history of Chinese argues that Old Chinese was typologically a 'mixed' language. It shows that, though its dominant word order was subject-verb-object, this coexisted with subject-object-verb. Professor Xu demonstrates that Old Chinese was not the analytic language it has usually been assumed to be, and that it employed morphological and lexical devices as well as syntactic means. She describes the typological changes that have taken place since the Han period and shows how Chinese evolved into a more analytic language, supporting her exposition with abundant examples. She draws where possible on archaeological findings in order to distinguish between versions of texts transmitted and sometimes modified through the hands of generations of copyists. The author focusses on syntactic issues, including word order, verbs, causative structures, resultative compounds, and negation, but also pays close attention to what she demonstrates are closely related changes in phonology and the writing system. The book will interest scholars and graduate students of Chinese linguistics, philology, classical literature as well as general linguists interested in word-order typology and language universals. It may be also be used as a text for advanced courses in Classical Chinese and Chinese diachronic syntax.

This handbook is structured in two parts: it provides, on the one hand, a comprehensive (synchronic) overview of the phonetics and phonology (including prosody) of a breadth of Romance languages and focuses, on the other hand, on central topics of research in Romance segmental and suprasegmental phonology, including comparative and diachronic perspectives. Phonetics and phonology have always been a core discipline in Romance linguistics: the wide synchronic variety of languages and dialects derived from spoken Latin is extensively explored in numerous corpus and atlas projects, and for quite a few of these varieties there is also more or less ample documentation of at least some of their diachronic stages. This rich empirical database offers excellent testing grounds for different theoretical approaches and allows for substantial insights into phonological structuring as well as into (incipient, ongoing, or concluded) processes of phonological change. The volume can be read both as a state-of-the-art report of research in the field and as a manual of Romance languages with special emphasis on the key topics of phonetics and phonology.

A remarkably clear and concise presentation of the phonological system of Norwegian by arguably the best Norwegian phonologist. The Norwegian language has undergone considerable change in the last 180 years, and in this book Gjert Kristoffersen considers the abundant evidence in order to provide us with an original analysis of the ways in which the sounds and meanings of competing languages may change and evolve.

Dialect, Culture, and Society in Eastern Arabia is a three-volume study of the Arabic dialects spoken in Bahrain by its older generation in the mid-1970s, and the socio-cultural factors that produced them. Volume 1: Glossary, published in 2001, lists all the dialectal vocabulary, with extensive contextual exemplification, and cross-referenced to other lexica, which occurred in the complete set of texts recorded during fieldwork. Volume 2: Ethnographic Texts presents a selection of these texts, transcribed, annotated and translated, and with detailed background essays, covering major aspects of the pre-oil culture of the Gulf and the initial stages of the transition to the modern era: pearl diving, agriculture, communal relations, marriage, childhood, domestic life, work. Excerpts from local dialect poems concerned with these subjects are also included. Volume 3: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Style is based on an extensive archive of recorded material, gathered for its ethnographic as well as its purely linguistic interest.

This unique work is the first book to bring systematically gathered and analyzed data to bear on the question of how contemporary poetry reaches the American public. It explores the publishing patterns, experiences, methods, motivations, and rewards of 203 living American poets from 1950 through 1980. Although all the poets have published quite widely, including at least one poetry book, they range from the little-known to the famous, from the well-established to the relatively young, from those who write in more or less traditional forms to the highly experimental. Among the many poets who cooperated in the study are Philip Levine, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Theodore Enslin, Maxine Kumin, May Swenson, Donald Justice, William Stafford, Mona Van Duyn, Robert Hass, and Robert Pinsky. The book also explores the roles played by the major categories of periodicals that publish poetry-general interest magazines, academic literary journals, and independent little magazines. Commercial book presses, university presses, and small presses are also tracked and analyzed.

Information for this study was obtained from various sources, including the many hundreds of little magazines and academic literary journals published throughout the thirty years; published interviews, with articles and statements by the 203 poets; and an extensive questionnaire survey sent to the poets, as well as many expansive letters that accommodate their returned questionnaires. Two chapters frame the findings. Chapter 1 surveys the publishing of American poetry from approximately 1900 through the 1940s, highlighting important tendencies and trends that continued through 1980. Chapter 8 surveys American poetry publishing since 1980, paying special attention to the major change during this decade: the dramatic decline in public funding for nonprofit literary enterprises. This volume should appeal to those interested in the sociology of publishing, American literature, or creative writing.

This volume provides new insights into various issues on prosody in contact situations, contact referring here to the L2 acquisition process as well as to situations where two language systems may co-exist. A wide array of phenomena are dealt with (prosodic description of linguistic systems in contact situations, analysis of prosodic changes, language development processes, etc.), and the results obtained may give an indication of what is more or less stable in phonological and prosodic systems. In addition, the selected papers clearly show how languages may have influenced or may have been influenced by other language varieties (in multilingual situations where different languages are in constant contact with one another, but also in the process of L2 acquisition). Unlike previous volumes on related topics, which focus in general either on L2 acquisition or on the description and analyses of different varieties of a given language, this volume considers both topics in parallel, allowing comparison and discussion of the results, which may shed new light on more far-reaching theoretical questions such as the role of markedness in prosody and the causes of prosodic changes.

Speech Rate, Pause, and Sociolinguistic Variation examines the confluence of psycholinguistic factors and social factors in linguistic variation through corpus-based analyses of speech rate and silent pause in US English. In particular, based on a large amount of data extracted from a wide range of sociolinguistic interview recordings, it demonstrates the great extent to which articulation rates are correlated with social factors of speakers (such as regional origin and sex) while pause durations are less so. Through the development of new quantitative techniques, it considers the cognitive importance of variability in pauses and highlights new ways that speech features like these can be used to help understand the production of sociolinguistic variables. With detailed discussions of its data and methods, and with a helpful accompanying website, it makes a valuable guide for conducting one's own corpus (socio)phonetic research.

Armenian is geographically one of the most widespread languages of the world, with distinct dialects located as far west as Poland and as far east as India. It has a rich literary history dating from the fourth-century translation of the Bible into Classical Armenian. It is one of the most linguistically divergent of the Indo-European languages, having undergone a host of complicated phonological, morphological, and syntactic changes that continue to resist satisfactory analysis. However, the language has yet to receive a comprehensive treatment by theoretical linguists. Bert Vaux remedies this problem, bringing Armenian into the sphere of phonological discussion by making available to Western readers the results of Armenological work published in Armenian and Russian, and by presenting theoretical analyses of many of the more striking phonological phenomena described in these sources or culled from the author's fieldwork. The topics addressed include syllabification, stress assignment, vowel harmony, feature geometry, consonantvowel interactions, and prosodic structure. Series Information: The Phonology of the World's Languages Series Editor: Professor Jacques Durand, Universite de Toulouse-le-Mirail Series ISBN: 0-19-961355-9 Series Description: The phonology of most languages has until now been available only in a fragmented way, through unpublished theses, or articles scattered in more or less accessible journals. Each volume in this series will offer an extensive treatment of the phonology of one language within a modern theoretical perspective and will provide comprehensive references to recent and more classical studies of the language.

Natural language differs from artificial ones in having the "displacement property," allowing expressions to "move" from one position to another in the sentence. The mapping from syntax to phonology, therefore, must include rules specifying how objects created by movement are pronounced, or in technical jargon, how chains are linearized. One of these rules is Copy Deletion. The present study investigates the structural description of Copy Deletion. Specifically, it proposes a phrase geometric constraint on its application. The proposal is corroborated by empirical arguments based on distributional and interpretational facts concerning predicate clefts, NP-Splits, and head ordering patterns. The data are drawn from languages of different types and families including Chinese, English, Dutch, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, Swedish, and Vietnamese. The book, thus, contributes to our understanding of a crucial property of natural language and should be of relevance to readers who are interested in the cross-linguistic approach to Universal Grammar research.

This book is the most complete phonology of contemporary Polish ever published. It is topic-oriented and presents the fundamental characteristics and problems associated with each topic, among them syllable structure, vowel-zero alternations, palatalizations, and other vowel and consonant changes. Professor Gussmann re-examines assumptions about phonological contrasts and alternations, and raises and addresses central questions in morphophonology. He takes morphophonology to be systematically separate from phonology. Palatalizations, he shows, are crucial to Polish, as both phonological and morphophonological phenomena: their detailed description leads him to a systematic presentation of vocalic alternations.
The book develops a Government Phonology account of Polish, but is primarily a description of the language with the model subordinated to the organization of data. All the many examples used to illustrate the presentation are transcribed in standard IPA, and translated. This important book will interest all scholars and advanced students of Polish and Slavic phonology.

The pervasive use of dislocations (as in Le chocolat, c'est bon) is a key characteristic of spoken French. This book offers various new and well-motivated insights, based on tests conducted by the author, on the syntactic analysis, prosody, and the interpretation of dislocation in spoken French. It also considers important aspects of the acquisition of dislocation by monolingual children learning different French dialects.
The author argues that spoken French is a discourse-configurational language, in which topics are obligatorily dislocated. She develops a syntactically parsimonious account, which maximizes the import of interfaces involved with discourse and prosody. She proposes clear diagnostics, following a reexamination of the status of subject clitics and a reevaluation of the characteristic prosody of dislocated constituents. The theoretical arguments throughout the book rest on data that comes from corpora of spontaneous production and from various elitication experiments.
This book throws new light on French syntax and prosody and makes an important and original contribution to the study of linguistic interfaces. Clearly expressed and tightly argued it will interest scholars and advanced students of French and of its acquisition as a first language as well as linguistic theorists interested in the interfaces between syntax, discourse, and phonology.

The essays in this volume address a core question regarding the structure of linguistic systems: how much access do the grammatical components - syntax, morphology and phonology - have to each other? The book's fifteen essays make a powerful argument in favor of a particular view of the interaction of these various components, shedding light on the nature of locality domains for allomorph selection, the morphosyntactic properties of the targets of phonological exponence, and adjudicating between competing theories of morphosyntaxphonology interaction. These words incorporate insights from recent theoretical developments such as Optimality Theory and Distributed Morphology, and insights made available to us by contemporary empirical methodologies, including field work and experimental and corpus-based quantitative work.

This book examines how a new dialect emerges. It is based on empirical research carried out in Waumandee, Wisconsin, a small community set in a linguistically uncharted territory in North America. Waumandee English is influenced by the native languages of settlers who arrived from different parts of Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Poland, Austria and Ireland. Traditional dialectology augmented by sociolinguistic and psychological parameters enables the reader to follow the path of current dialect emergence in Waumandee English.

This volume presents current work on a topic in Romance linguistics that still informs linguistic theory to this day: metaphony in the languages of Italy. Papers discuss fundamental research topics such as phonological opacity in the light of chain shifts, post-tonic harmony and consonant transparency, the role of morphosyntax in the typology of metaphony, the explanatory adequacy of feature-based versus element-based analyses, and the locus of metaphony in grammar. Other chapters present new experimental data, thus building a more accurate empirical foundation for the study of metaphony. We envision the volume to become a reference book not only for an updated descriptive survey of metaphonic patterns in Italy but also a thorough discussion of the challenges that metaphony poses for different (morpho)phonological theories. The book bridges the gap between descriptive works and theoretical thinking in the study of metaphony.

The "Handbook of the Syllable" approaches the study of the phonology and phonetics of the syllable with theoretical, empirical and methodological heterogeneity as its guiding principle. Since the mid-nineteenth century, scholars in the phonetic and phonological sciences have found it convenient to refer to the syllable, but definitions are scarce and none apply to all areas where the syllable is frequently invoked. The Handbook s seventeen chapters focus on empirical studies of the syllable by presenting both new data and new kinds of data. The work addresses the syllable in phonology, phonetics, experimental psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, diachronic linguistics, and orthography. It is a seminal reference book for researchers exploring any empirical area where the notion of 'the syllable' is invoked.