Volume 51, Issue 2

This paper seeks to analyze the internal structure of "kull" structures and hence the asymmetries that arise in the context of such structures in Modern Standard Arabic. It is argued that "kull"-initial and "kull"-final are derivationally unrelated. Drawing on a number of structural asymmetries, the quantifier is argued to project into a quantifier phrase which is merged inside a determiner phrase. The difference between quantifier-initial and quantifier-final structures relates to the position where the quantifier phrase is merged. In quantifier-initial structures, the quantifier phrase is argued to be merged as the complement of the determiner while in quantifier-final structures, the quantifier phrase is argued to be adjoined to DP. Within this context, syntactic as well as semantic conse-quences result from the initial merge of the quantifier phrase.

The aim of this paper is to analyze linguistic factors which influence the usage of prothetic /v/ in speech of older speakers in Prague. The analysis is based on informal 1 hour long interviews with 17 speakers (9 women, 8 men) from Prague aged between 60 and 71 years. All of the speakers were born in Prague and they lived there for most of their lives. Altogether, there are 2769 occurrences of the variable (v): 538 /Ø/ and 2231 /v/. It can be seen that the speakers in the sample prefer using the prothetic /v/. Based on a generalized linear mixed model, we show that the use of (v) is influenced by word frequency, presence of a prefix and borrowedness of the word. Other variables do not fit in the model. If compared with older data by Jančák (1974) and the recent data on younger speakers from Prague by Chromý (2015), it can be seen that there is a change in progress in the use of (v) in Prague and that the prothetic /v/ seems to be on slow decline.

A key issue in judging foreign accent is to isolate the phonetic component from potentially confounding higher-level factors such as grammatical or prosodic errors which arise when using natural sentence-length speech material. The current study evaluated accent and intelligibility ratings of children’s speech for isolated words spliced out of extemporaneous material elicited via a picture description task. Experiment 1 demonstrated that word scores and accent ratings provided by native judges pattern as in earlier studies, validating the use of word-based material derived from natural speech. In a second experiment, listeners rated the degree of foreign accent and comprehensibility for unrelated sequences of 1 to 8 words from the same talker. Degree of foreign accent was judged to increase with sequence length, asymptoting by 2 word sequences, although listeners did not rate the sequence based on the most-accented word it contains. Comprehensibility was judged to be lower as sequence length increased, asymptoting at 4 words. These findings suggest that short sequences of randomly-permuted words extracted from extemporaneous speech can be used for robust accent and comprehensibility judgements whose focus is on the phonetic basis for deviations from the native norm.

This paper presents an analysis of Tashlhiyt Berber syllabification in the Onset Promi-nence (OP) representational framework. With a structural perspective on manner of articulation, OP captures the apparent role of sonority in TB syllabification. It is shown, however, that this does not entail the assignment of "peak" status to the most sonorous available segments in a given string. Sonority based "peak" assignment cannot account for the ambiguous behavior exhibited by syllables in with the "peak" is less sonorous than its "onset", and makes infelicitous predictions with regard to the behavior of "onsetless" syllables. By contrast, the OP environment provides mechanisms in which such ambiguities fall out from more general principles of constituent formation.

This paper discusses the pattern of extraction of genitives out of definite DPs in English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese (BP), with consideration of the Specificity Effect (Fiengo and Higginbotham 1981), a constraint that in English, for instance, prevents extraction from definite/specific DPs, allowing extraction only for indefinite DPs. BP allows extraction from DPs headed by definite and indefinite articles, but blocks extraction from DPs headed by demonstratives. Spanish allows extractions from indefinite DPs and blocks extraction from DPs headed by demonstratives. In addition, it blocks extraction of possessors and agents from DPs headed by definite articles, but allows extraction from themes in this context. In order to theoretically support our proposal, we consider the analysis presented by Ticio (2003, 2006), along with Grohmann's (2000) notion of prolific domains and the restrictions on movement observed by Ticio for Spanish, but with suggested modifications. We suggest that the different patterns of extraction of genitives found in English, Spanish and BP are due to the position in which the article holds, and also due to the category that allows genitives in each of these languages.

This paper offers a minimalist account of the distribution of the features of case, number and gender in Polish phrases with cardinal numerals and vague quantifiers (Q-NPs) in the presence and absence of genitive of quantification (GQ) based on the assumption that GQ-cardinal numerals and vague quantifiers are phrasal and are merged as adjuncts to the projection of a null functional head (F), a phase head that values its complement with GQ in contexts in which GQ is not overridden by inherent theta-related or lexical case. Whether the null head F inserted in the derivation has unvalued features of number and gender has consequences for the syntactic computation of agreement relations, in which features may be shared. Heterogeneous case distribution in Q-NPs in nominative-accusative case contexts provides evidence that F is a phase head and triggers transfer of its complement. Variable agreement patterns of both attributive adjectival modifiers and adjectival predicates in the presence of GQ are argued here to reflect attempted-but-failed syntactic agreement, which does not lead to ungrammaticality, as some features unvalued in narrow syntax can still be interpreted by morphological realization rules in PF. GQ is shown here to provide evidence that predicative adjectives cannot have their φ-features valued in situ and must be remerged in a position where their φ-probes can initiate Search for matching features. Agreement in the presence of GQ in Polish thus demonstrates that the need of features to be valued drives syntactic movement.