Volume 58, Issue 2

Previous research on similarity avoidance has focused on such phonological factors as featural similarity and adjacency. This paper additionally investigates the phonology-morphology interface and draws attention to morphological and lexical effects of similarity avoidance. Avoidance of identical or similar sounds may give rise to a variety of strategies, including periphrastic category formation, an unexpected allomorph of the stem or affix and a lexical gap. It is argued that, although similarity avoidance has a universal basis in language processing, the various strategies to implement it are construction specific. In particular, it is shown that one construction may exhibit a different scope of OCP effects than another, which entails that the constraints regulating OCP effects should be morphosyntactically indexed, in turn requiring reference to multiple cophonologies with distinct properties. A novel finding is that cophonologies may be delimited by the syntactic category of the base of category formation. Drawing on the insight of Construction Morphology, the analysis represents dissimilation as an interaction of construction-specific OCP constraints with schemas that include reference to the base. In order to derive the gradience of OCP effects, the relevant constraints are ranked on the basis of a similarity metric and formal complexity. The proposed constraint-based analysis aims to represent the construction-specific strategies for dealing with dissimilation and capture the observed gradience of the pressure.

The typicality effect delineates a graded membership structure during categorization, whereby a typical item is easier to be judged as a member of a category than is an atypical item. The current study brought experimental evidence of the typicality representation of advanced Thai learners of Chinese, in order to compare the organization of the mental lexicon in the learners’ second language and first language. Three types of instances (i.e., typical in both Chinese and Thai (C1), typical in Chinese but not in Thai (C2), and typical in Thai but not in Chinese (C3)) in five categories (i.e., BIRD, VEGETABLE, FRUIT, FURNITURE, APPLIANCE) were presented in instance-category order. The response time of typicality judgement showed a similarity between natives and L2 learners, but that the response time of second language learners to C1 was not significantly longer than that to C2. These results suggested that high proficiency could modify the construction of a qualitatively native-like typicality representation, and that language-specific typicality was still beyond conceptualization in second language.

The goal of this paper is to offer an account of the discourse properties of urbanonynms in Italian (e.g. Via Roma , Piazza di Spagna ). The paper introduces urbanonyms as a sub-type of toponyms (place names) whose linguistic properties have received little attention so far. The paper proposes an experimental study that shows how urbanonyms can enter in anaphoric relations mediated via urbanonyms’ lexico-grammatical properties. Via these experimental results, it is shown that urbanonyms can act as antecedents of indexical pronouns (e.g. qui ‘here’), and complex noun phrases (e.g. questa via ‘this street’). It is also shown that urbanonyms can involve co-referring patterns in sentences including verba nominandi ( chiamarsi ‘to be called’). These results are discussed against the theoretical proposals investigating toponyms and other proper names. It is suggested that the two main “rival” theories on names, the description theory and the causal reference theory, can only address the novel data if combined into a new theoretical synthesis.

“Dla” and “ku” are widely considered to be multifunctional and polysemous prepositions sharing at least some semantic components. While agreeing with their wide functional spectrum, the author argues for them to be monosemous: “dla” brings a positive evaluation of something from a given perspective, whereas “ku” points to something happening when something else occurs. By analysing their connectivity and interchangeability, the author proves that, against lexicographic descriptions, the semantic structures of these prepositions are not identical and, in fact, do not share any semantic components. The semantic differences between the two prepositions make them prone to different types of contexts. “Dla” appears in purposive-intentional and benefactive contexts and collocates with various types of nouns, from gerunds to personal nouns. “Ku” prefers resultative sentences, in which it introduces a special stylistic tone of sobriety. Due to this, possible collocations of this preposition are very limited, and many are reported to be undergoing lexicalization.

The report describes the recorded corpus of Polish geminate consonants. It is available at <http://www.prospeech.pl/kategorie/polgem> It contains 111 words with double consonant letters produced by 54 native speakers of Polish, yielding a total of 5994 recorded tokens. The corpus may be used for future research on the production of Polish geminates or for perception experiments with speakers of other geminating or non-geminating languages. The report provides information on the lexical structure of the corpus, recruited speakers and recording specification. It also contains basic statistics of the rate of observed degemination and rearticulation.

This paper studies how readers respond to a counterfactual request inviting them to imagine themselves in the shoes of an immigrant in a corpus of online reader comments to a Yahoo article on Latino immigration. We initially considered 7,000 comments and for our corpus and analysis selected those in which the commenters perform a deictic shift, i.e. assume the deictic center of the immigrant using the first-person pronoun I and the adjective my , which totalled to 452 comments. The discourse of the comments, however, turned out to be very moralizing – i.e. while managing to assume the spatial and the temporal position of the immigrants, they refused to share the same moral grounds as them, which resulted in a series of I would… and I would never… propositions, which frame the commenters as vastly morally superior to the immigrants. The commenters occupy the legality, good parenting, patriotism and gratitude moral high grounds and often revert to moral grandstanding.

The aim of this research is to investigate the relation between musical aptitude and the acquisition of L2 rhythm by Polish advanced learners of English. A longitudinal study was conducted among 50 Polish students of English reading the “Please Call Stella” passage before and after an intensive two-semester accent training course supplemented by an extensive practical course in English phonetics and phonology. Participants also completed two musical hearing tests (Mandell 2009) and a survey on musical experience. Automated alignment was performed in DARLA (Reddy and Stanford 2015) and reviewed in Praat (Boersma and Weenink 2019). We compared the rhythm metrics calculated in Correlatore (Mairano and Romano 2010) before and after training and juxtaposed them against the pronunciation teachers’ results. We reported a significant difference between the scores for vocalic intervals across all rhythm metrics, indicating that participants’ produced higher vocalic variation after training, more similar to their teachers. However, we observed no significant relationship between the participants’ rhythm metric scores and their musical hearing test scores or musical experience, suggesting that musical aptitude might not play a crucial role in the L2 rhythm production in a formal academic learning environment.