Showing papers in "Lingua in 1978"

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present data from one subject (J) which show a gradual development of the complexity of words in terms of syllable structure and degree of phonetic similarity of co-occurring consonants.

TL;DR: It is argued that just like ergative languages have both ergative and accusative patterns, accusative languages, too, have patterns of both major types.

TL;DR: The cardinal numerals of Russian cannot be assigned to discrete syntactic categories; they form a continuum from those like adjectives to those like nouns as mentioned in this paper, and nouniness increases with numerical value.

TL;DR: A correct interpretation of the genitive plural forms in Slavic and related languages requires a detailed chronological analysis of the material as mentioned in this paper, which is not always easy to be done in practice.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors elucidate some of the principles governing cross-linguistic variation in such phonological processes as Terminal Devoicing and Intervocalic Voicing and show that the theory of atomic phonology provides a correct characterization of these processes and their associated constraints.

TL;DR: The linguistic transformation of Coordination Reduction is reexamined in light of some new data and a proposal for treating this data, by modifying the existing scheme of Harries (1973; and Langendoen 1975), is outlined.

TL;DR: It is proposed that such ‘schizophrenic’ leveling entails that both allomorph A and B must be entered into the lexicon, and hence this view supports the position taken in Hudson (1974) that non-productive alternation must be dealt with by means of suppletion.

TL;DR: The history of Slavic accentuation is not really difficult, but it is complex because of the heterogeneity of the material and the unusual abundance of relevant details as discussed by the authors, and the difficulty is all the more serious for Indo-Europeanists who have no access to Russian publications because the fundamental contributions by Dybo and Illic-Svityc have not, to my knowledge, been translated.

TL;DR: In this article, it has been suggested that languages show a tendency to alternate between synthetic and analytic construction, synthetic forms being replaced by analytic ones, and these then resynthesizing.

TL;DR: In this paper, the pre-quantifiers were reanalyzed as a new and distinct category of quantifiers and the reanalysis sheds light on limits to possible grammars and illustrates the importance of viewing diachronic change as formal change in an abstract system of grammar.

TL;DR: It is shown that an approach based on Distinctive Features is inadequate to account for the forms of the diminutive suffix after words ending in a sonorant consonant, and the apparently anomalous behaviour of words containing the vowels can be explained by appealing to the notion of phonological strength.

TL;DR: It is shown that analyses of the meaning and form of passives in some thirty languages were in error and that ‘be’ is not an attribute of the passive, namely because ‘ be-passives’ are a subset of a set of sentences with nominal predicates.

TL;DR: This article reviewed theoretical and methodological considerations in psycholinguistic experiments on ambiguity over the last decade and assessed the treatment of ambiguity as to whether it should be considered analogous in any significant way to sentence production and processing.

TL;DR: In this paper, two related ongoing changes in Israeli Hebrew are discussed in order to show how morphophonemic changes may be stymied if they lead to lexical merger, and how these changes are blocked in specific environments where the lexical merge or semantic opacity would result if the phonological opacity were removed unimpeded.

TL;DR: In this paper, a collection of all types of questions which occur in tape recordings of spontaneous speech of native Edinburgh Scottish English speakers were analyzed. But the authors focused on the intonation contours of the questions and not the content of the answers.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue in favor of the traditional monogenetic theory on the localization of the High German Consonant Shift, using the theory of lexical diffusion and analyzing the dynamics of phonological rule borrowing.

TL;DR: A tentative principle of linguistic preservation is proposed: morpheme types tend to replace lost canonical positions in ‘monosyllabic, isolating’ languages.

TL;DR: This article showed that correlative formation in Spanish is a separate sequential recursive process and that their conjoining cannot be explained by the process of Relativization, Complementation or Coordination.

TL;DR: The authors showed that linguistic variation in Caribbean English post-Creole continua is not simply a product of decreolization, nor are all differences between continua products of differential decreolisation.