Lenition And Contrast

This book analyzes 153 languages from a large variety of families to establish a previously unexplored relationship between phonetically conditioned sound changes such as lenitions and functional (meaning maintenance related) considerations. Carefully collecting numerous inventories of consonants, this collection is likely to become an important resource for future linguistics research. By distinguishing between phonetic and phonological neutralization, and showing that the first does not necessarily result in the second, Naomi Gurevich uncovers previously unexplored and often surprising trends in the relationship between phonetics and phonology.

This book analyzes 153 languages from a large variety of families to establish a previously unexplored relationship between phonetically conditioned sound changes such as lenitions and functional (meaning maintenance related) considerations. Carefully collecting numerous inventories of consonants, this collection is likely to become an important resource for future linguistics research. By distinguishing between phonetic and phonological neutralization, and showing that the first does not necessarily result in the second, Naomi Gurevich uncovers previously unexplored and often surprising trends in the relationship between phonetics and phonology.

There are books on tone, coronals, the internal structure of segments, vowel harmony, and a couple of other topics in phonology. This book aims to fill the gap for Lenition and Fortition, which is one of the first phenomena that was addressed by phonologists in the 19th century, and ever since contributed to phonological thinking. It is certainly one of the core phenomena that is found in the phonology of natural language: together with assimilations, the other important family of phenomena, Lenition and Fortition constitute the heart of what phonology can do to sound. The book aims to provide an overall treatment of the question in its many aspects: historical, typological, synchronic, diachronic, empirical and theoretical. Various current approaches to phonology are represented. The book is structured into three parts: 1) properties and behaviour of Lenition/Fortition, 2) lenition patterns in particular languages and language families, 3) how Lenition/Fortition work. Part 1 describes the properties of lenition and fortition: what counts as such? What kind of behaviour is observed? Which factors bear on it (positional, stress-related)? Which role has it played in phonology since (and even before) the 19th century? The everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-lenition-and-fortition philosophy that guides the conception of the book supposes a descriptive, generalisation-oriented style of writing that relies on a kind of phonological lingua franca, rather than on theory-laden vocabulary. Also, no prior knowledge other than about general phonological categories should be required when reading through Part 1. The goal is to provide a broad picture of what lenition is, how it behaves, which factors it is conditioned by and what generalisations it obeys. This record may then be used as a yardstick for competing theories. Part 2 presents a number of case studies that show how Lenition/Fortition behave in a number of languages that include systems which are notoriously emblematic for Lenition/Fortition: Celtic, Western Romance, Germanic and Finnish. Finally, Part 3 is concerned with the analysis of the patterns that have been described in Parts 1 and 2. Given their analytic orientation, Part 3 chapters are theory-specific. They look at the same empirical record, or at a subset thereof, and try to explain what they see. Even though Part 3 chapters are couched in a specific theoretical environment that most of the time supposes prior conceptual knowledge, authors have been asked to assure theoretical interoperability as much as they could.

The annual conference series Going Romance has developed into a major European discussion forum where ideas about language and linguistics and about Romance languages in particular are put in an inter-active perspective, giving room to both universality and Romance-internal variation. The current volume contains a selection of the papers that were presented at the 20th Going Romance conference, held at the VU University in Amsterdam in December 2006. The papers in the volume deal with current issues in phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, and range across a variety of Romance languages."

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.

A mainstay of functional linguistics has been the claim that linguistic elements and patterns that are frequently used in discourse become conventionalized as grammar. This book addresses the two issues that are basic to this claim: first, the question of what types of elements are frequently used in discourse and second, the question of how frequency of use affects cognitive representations. Reporting on evidence from natural conversation, diachronic change, variability, child language acquisition and psycholinguistic experimentation the original articles in this book support two major principles. First, the content of people s interactions consists of a preponderance of subjective, evaluative statements, dominated by the use of pronouns, copulas and intransitive clauses. Second, the frequency with which certain items and strings of items are used has a profound influence on the way language is broken up into chunks in memory storage, the way such chunks are related to other stored material and the ease with which they are accessed to produce new utterances.

"The thirty-ninth annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) was held for the first time at the University of Arizona 27-29 March 2009. The by-now traditional parasession was on devoted to Variation and Change in Romance

Available online or as a five-volume print set, The Blackwell Companion to Phonology is a major reference work drawing together 124 new contributions from leading international scholars in the field. It will be indispensable to students and researchers in the field for years to come. Key Features: Full explorations of all the most important ideas and key developments in the field Documents major insights into human language gathered by phonologists in past decades; highlights interdisciplinary connections, such as the social and computational sciences; and examines statistical and experimental techniques Offers an overview of theoretical positions and ongoing debates within phonology at the beginning of the twenty-first century An extensive reference work based on the best and most recent scholarly research – ideal for advanced undergraduates through to faculty and researchers Publishing simultaneously in print and online; visit www.companiontophonology.com for full details Additional features of the online edition (ISBN: 978-1-4443-3526-2): Powerful searching, browsing, and cross-referencing capabilities, including Open URL linking, with all entries classified by key topic, subject, place, people, and period For those institutions already subscribing to Blackwell Reference Online, it offers fully integrated and searchable content with the comprehensive Handbooks in Linguistics series