The integration of traditional and modern linguistics as well as diachrony and synchrony is the hallmark of an influential trend in contemporary research on language. It is documented in the present collection of 21 new papers on the history and structure of the sounds and other (sub-) systems of human languages, sharing the common reference point of Theo Vennemann, a leading figure in the above-mentioned trend, whom the authors want to honor with this Festschrift.

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 book provides the first systematic descriptive analysis of the phonological system of Romanian, one of the less studied Romance languages, from the perspective of recent phonological theory. The author offers an account of some of the major phonological processes of modern standard Romanian, set in the framework of Optimality Theory and Correspondence Theory. The book begins with an overview of Romanian phonology - segment inventory, phonotactics, inflectional and derivational morphology. The main part of the study focuses on processes involving vocalic segments: glide-vowel and diphthong-vowel alternations, vowel harmony, palatalization. The major issues addressed include feature theory, syllable structure, metrical structure and stress, the interaction between phonology and morphology. Acoustic phonetic data is used as supporting evidence for the phonological patterning of diphthongs and glide-vowel sequences. Interesting complexities of the system are pointed out and discussed, as they pose certain challenges to the theoretical model. The book contains an abundance of systematically organized data, which makes it a solid reference for students and scholars of general and Romance phonology, and a strong basis for further study.

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 study had a research purpose and a pedagogical purpose. Research disclosed the dynamic, changing nature of (learner-internal and learner-external) variables that influence strategic competence for developing EFL/ESL writers. This competence was found necessary for international graduate students to move from writer-centered learning to reader-centered communication. The research instruments proved to be practical tools for guiding learners' processes of learning and writing a scholarly paper or article and avoiding plagiarism. The implication for teachers and program administrators is a systematic approach for developing self-regulation (control) in EFL/ESL writing. The first part of the book reports on the mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) research. The second part gives an in-depth report of the 6 cases used in the research. The third part presents tools for systematically developing self-regulation in scholarly (and academic) writing with (a) student and teacher checklists for formative assessment that are valid and reliable; and (b) a model syllabus for teachers that can be adapted across disciplines and genres. These tools deal with learning strategies and their applications to writing and writing instruction.

This book presents a comprehensive and critical overview of historical phonology as it stands today. Scholars from around the world consider and advance research in every aspect of the field. In doing so they demonstrate the continuing vitality of one of the oldest sub-disciplines of linguistics. The book is divided into six parts. The first considers key current research questions, the early history of the field, and the structuralist context for work on sound change. The second examines evidence and methods, including phonological reconstruction, typology, and computational and quantitative approaches. Part III looks at types of phonological change, including stress, tone, and morphophonological change. Part IV explores a series of controversial aspects within the field, including the effects of first language acquisition, the mechanisms of lexical diffusion, and the role of individuals in innovation. Part V considers the main theoretical perspectives including those of evolutionary phonology and generative historical phonology. The final part examines sociolinguistic and exogenous factors in phonological change, including the study of change in real time, the role of second language acquisition, and loanword adaptation. The authors, who represent leading proponents of every theoretical perspective, consider phonological change over a wide range of the world's language families. The handbook is, in sum, a valuable resource for phonologists and historical linguists and a stimulating guide for their students.

This book provides an overview of the role of the syllable in Optimality Theory (OT) and ways in which problems that relate to the analysis of syllable structure can be solved in OT. The contributions to the book show that the syllable not only sheds light on certain properties of OT itself. They also show that OT is capable of describing and adequately analyzing many issues that are problematic in other theories. The analyses are based on a wealth of languages.

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.

Siraya is a Formosan language once spoken around Tainan City in southwest Taiwan. This comprehensive study is based on an analysis of the language of the Siraya Gospel of St. Matthew, which was translated from the Dutch in 1661. It contains a grammar, lexicon and extensive text with interlinear glossing as well as an introduction with detailed background information. Siraya has many unique linguistic features, which are of great interest to the study of linguistic typology in general. They include various reduplication patterns, orientation prefixes (adding the notions of motion, location or comitation to a verb) and anticipating sequences. The latter are (usually) formal elements of the lexical verb, such as a first consonant or a first syllable, which are prefixed to the auxiliary. Siraya is also of crucial importance for the prehistory of Taiwan because it is one of the first languages to branch off from the Austronesian language family, which has more than 1200 members. The volume is a major contribution to the Siraya people who are keen to rehabilitate Siraya culture heritage and are endeavouring to learn their lost language again. It is a unique achievement in the endeavour to revitalise the traditional languages of Taiwan.

Speech: A dynamic process takes readers on a rigorous exploratory journey to expose them to the inherently dynamic nature of speech. The book addresses an intriguing question: Based only on physical principles alone, can the exploitation of a simple acoustic tube evolve into an optimal speech production system comparable to the one we possess? In the work presented, the tube is deformed step by step with the sole criterion of expending minimum effort to obtain maximum acoustic variations. At the end of this process, the tube is found divided into distinctive regions and an acoustic space emerges capable of generating speech sounds. Attaching this tube to a model, an inherently dynamic and efficient system is created. In the resulting system, optimal primitive trajectories are seen to naturally exist in the acoustic space and the regions defined in the tube correspond to the main places of articulation for oral vowels and plosive consonants. All this implies that these speech sounds are inherent properties of not only the modeled acoustic tube but also of the human speech production system. This book stands as a valuable resource for accomplished and aspiring speech scientists as well as for other interested persons in search for an introduction to speech acoustics that takes an unconventional path.

The traditional focus of the Papers in Laboratory Phonology series has been on the relationship of phonology to phonetics. The present volume expands this domain in setting two new themes: language acquisition and lexical representation. Contributors tackle the central problem of what constitutes a possible word in generative phonology, employing contemporary approaches such as Optimality Theory, connectionism, and stochastic grammars. Several papers integrate the issues of lexical representation and language acquisition by undertaking to explain the organization of the adult phonological system as the end product of the acquisition process. Others explore the role of sequential frequency in the lexicon and the development of fine temporal control in production in the emergence of phonological segments and features. Papers in Laboratory Phonology V: Acquisition and the Lexicon will thus be of interest to a wide range of researchers in phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, cognitive science, and the study of speech and communication disorders.

This book presents a novel experimental approach to investigating the mental representation of linguistic alternatives. Combining theoretical and psycholinguistic questions concerning the nature of alternative sets, it sheds new light on the theory of focus and the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of alternatives. In a series of language comprehension experiments, the author shows that intonational focus and focus particles such as 'only' shape the representation of alternatives in a listener's mind in a fundamental way. This book is relevant to researchers interested in semantics, pragmatics, language processing and memory.

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.

The book contains a number of studies in Japanese phonology and morphology, all analyses by leading scholars in the field. It presents an overview of the work that has been done in Japan and other countries and offers new solutions to long-standing problems. In the phonology chapters, it focuses on segmental as well as suprasegmental issues, including voicing and tone, approaching these issues from a variety of perspectives, including Optimality Theory and Government Phonology. In the morphology chapters, attention is given to truncation patterns and the possibilities for compound formation.

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.

The present volume contains a selection of the papers and commentaries which were originally presented at the Tenth Conference of Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon10) held in Paris from June 29 to July 1, 2006. The theme of the volume is Variation, Phonetic Detail and Phonological Representation. It brings together specialists of different fields of speech research with the goal to discuss the relevance of patterns of variation and phonetic details on phonological representations and theories. The topic is addressed from the angles of speech production, perception, acquisition, speech disorders, and language universals. The contributions are grouped thematically in five sections, each of which is commented by invited discussants. Section I contains the contributions to the special '10th anniversary session' of the conference which represent in a prototypical way some of the different research questions that have been at the core of important debates over the last 20 years in the laboratory phonology community. Issues of phonological universals and language typology are addressed in section II. In section III, the notions of variation and phonetic detail are examined with regard to how they are acquired and dealt with in the formation of phonological representation in emerging systems. Section IV focuses on recent work at the crossroad between normal and disordered speech.

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.

It was not clear from early work in optimality theory how the theory could attack the rich range of phenomena now found in segmental alterations. However, there is now a body of work that concentrates on working out the details of featural phonology with OT, demonstrating that the theory allows superior explanations of the typological possibilities and the underlying motivations for these phenomena. This volume brings together current work by some of the influential researchers in this area, ranging from the authors of recent influential dissertations to prominent senior faculty.

In contrast to previous approaches to phonological typology, the typology of syllable and word languages relates the patterns of syllable structure, phoneme inventory, and phonological processes to the relevance of the prosodic domains of the syllable and the phonological word. This volume proves how useful this kind of typology is for the understanding of language variation and change. By providing a synchronic and diachronic account of the syllable and the phonological word in Central Catalan (Catalan dialect group) and Swabian (Alemannic dialect group), the author shows how the evolution of Old Catalan and Old Alemannic can be explained in terms of a typological drift toward an increased relevance of the phonological word. Further, the description of Central Catalan and Swabian allows to identify common strategies for profiling the phonological word and thus makes an important contribution to research on prosodic phonology.

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.

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.

There is currently a wealth of activity involving the analysis of complex segmental sequences from phonetic, phonological and psycholinguistic perspectives. This volume draws from selected contributions to the conference Consonant Clusters and Structural Complexity held in Munich in August 2008. Consonant sequences, whether occurring within individual lexical items or emerging in running speech at word boundaries, give particularly striking evidence for the temporal complexity of human speech. But contributions also consider the integration of tonal and vocalic elements into syllable structure. The main aim of the volume is to do justice to this complexity by bringing together researchers from a wide range of backgrounds. The book is organized into four main sections entitled 'Phonology and Typology', 'Production: Analysis and Models', 'Acquisition', and 'Assimilation and reduction in connected speech'.