By comparing linguistic varieties that are quite similar overall, linguists can often determine where and how grammatical systems differ, and how they change over time. Micro-Syntactic Variation in North American English provides a systematic look at minimal differences in the syntax of varieties of English spoken in North America. The book makes available for the first time a range of data on unfamiliar constructions drawn from several regional and social dialects, data whose distribution and grammatical properties shed light on the varieties under examination and on the properties of English syntax more generally. The nine contributions collected in this volume fall under a number of overlapping topics: variation in the expression of negation and modality (the "so don't I " construction in eastern New England, negative auxiliary inversion in declaratives in African-American and southern white English, multiple modals in southern speech, the "needs washed " construction in the Pittsburgh area); pronouns and reflexives (transitive expletives in Appalachia, personal dative constructions in the Southern/Mountain states, long-distance reflexives in the Minnesota Iron Range); and the relation between linguistic variation and language change (the rise of "drama SO " among younger speakers, the difficulty in establishing which phenomena cluster together and should be explained by a single point of parametric variation). These chapters delve into the syntactic analysis of individual phenomena, and the editors' introduction and afterword contextualize the issues and explore their semantic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic implications.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1997. The alternation between high vowels and glides is shown here to follow from the interaction of phonological constraints as defined by Prince and Smolensky's (1993) Optimality Theory. The alternation stems from simultaneously comparing moraic and nonmoraic parses of high vowels for constraint satisfaction

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This new book offers research that will affect further study of tone in Vietnamese and other tonal languages.

In linguistic study, tone is usually equated with pitch. Andrea Pham argues that this view of tone is problematic. Her acoustic analysis of tone in Vietnamese uses data from various speakers to show that the phonation features of breathiness and creakiness correlate much more closely with tonal perceptions than pitch height alone. This finding resolves what has long been regarded as a serious contradiction between the phonetics of certain Vietnamese tones and their phonological status. This new book offers research that will affect further study of tone in Vietnamese and other tonal languages.

This dissertation makes an important contribution to Correspondence Theory, set within Optimality Theory. By introducing the notion 'existential faithfulness,' Struijke is able to draw a strong connection between three phenomena usually thought to be unrelated, namely the emergence of the unmarked in reduplication, dissimilation and feature movement. The author argues that all are ways to improve the markedness of a form, while simultaneously ensuring the preservation of underlying material.
The book presents three in-depth case studies involving Kwakwala, Sanskrit and Cuzco Quechua, which reveal some striking properties of the phenomena under investigation.

This thesis presents pioneering work on the processing of a variety of distinct types of ellipsis sentences, concentrating on the role played by focus, intonation and parallelism. Through rigorous and well-documented experiments, the author shows that no special mechanisms are needed to process ellipsis sentences and that the effects of parallelism and prosody follow from properties observed in the processing of nonelided sentences.
While much is known about the processing of nonelided sentences, this book sheds valuable insights into the relatively little is known problem of processing ellipsis sentences.

Contents:
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Conservation approaches to compensatory lengthening
Chapter 3. Conditions on CVC compensatory lengthening
Chapter 4. Conditions on CVCV compensatory lengthening
Chapter 5. Synchronic CL: an analysis and implications
Chapter 6. Summary and conclusions
Appendix I: Languages with CVC CL
Appendix II: Languages with CVCV CL
References
Index

First Published in 1997. The alternation between high vowels and glides is shown here to follow from the interaction of phonological constraints as defined by Prince and Smolensky's (1993) Optimality Theory. The alternation stems from simultaneously comparing moraic and nonmoraic parses of high vowels for constraint satisfaction

By comparing linguistic varieties that are quite similar overall, linguists can often determine where and how grammatical systems differ, and how they change over time. Micro-Syntactic Variation in North American English provides a systematic look at minimal differences in the syntax of varieties of English spoken in North America. The book makes available for the first time a range of data on unfamiliar constructions drawn from several regional and social dialects, data whose distribution and grammatical properties shed light on the varieties under examination and on the properties of English syntax more generally. The nine contributions collected in this volume fall under a number of overlapping topics: variation in the expression of negation and modality (the "so don't I " construction in eastern New England, negative auxiliary inversion in declaratives in African-American and southern white English, multiple modals in southern speech, the "needs washed " construction in the Pittsburgh area); pronouns and reflexives (transitive expletives in Appalachia, personal dative constructions in the Southern/Mountain states, long-distance reflexives in the Minnesota Iron Range); and the relation between linguistic variation and language change (the rise of "drama SO " among younger speakers, the difficulty in establishing which phenomena cluster together and should be explained by a single point of parametric variation). These chapters delve into the syntactic analysis of individual phenomena, and the editors' introduction and afterword contextualize the issues and explore their semantic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic implications.