Volume 41, Issue 2

This study challenges the widespread belief that Thai lacks word stress, demonstrating its pivotal role in morphophonology. Through a Maximum Entropy analysis, we investigated how specific segmental properties statistically influence speakers’ choices of word order in coordinate compounds. Results indicate a significant effect of phonological weight on the ordering patterns. Specifically, the dispreference for stop codas in final positions and the preference for long or low vowels word-finally converge to differentially distribute phonological weight, ensuring that final syllables are heavier in accordance with the Stress-to-Weight Principle. Additionally, a marginal affinity is observed between the final syllable and the (historical) high-register tone, aligning with the well-documented tone-stress interaction where high tones gravitate towards stressed syllables. These findings provide compelling evidence for the existence of word stress in Thai: compound stress necessarily coincides with word stress, as dictated by the Continuous Column Constraint. Thus, this work suggests that relying solely on phonetic cues is insufficient for identifying stress; instead, a comprehensive analysis incorporating “phonological exponents” is essential to capture the greater phonological contrasts licensed in stressed syllables. This study also contributes to a deeper understanding of metrical and prosodic prominence, revealing that word stress can sometimes be masked by higher-level prominence.

In this paper I study Spanish sound emission verbs ( sonar ‘to ring’) and degree achievements ( enfriar ‘to cool’), which are intriguing insofar as they turn out to express gradable events, and argue that they are not gradable, although they can trigger quantity readings whereby there is a degree whose value changes throughout the event. Thus, my analysis aligns with other works on different languages (Japanese, German, Catalan and English) that have already pointed out that stativity is necessary to license gradability in certain syntactic constructions. However, my proposal goes a step forward insofar as it explicitly formulates that events cannot be gradable and explains in precise terms why gradability requires stativity. Assuming that activities are divisible into intervals and states into subintervals, I argue that gradability is only possible for the latter because it consists in measuring subintervals in intensity.

This paper addresses how the negative particle no interacts with Spanish deverbal nominalizations that denote an event. Firstly, it is pointed out that, when preceded by negation, these nominalizations only give rise to the inhibited eventuality reading, contrary to what happens with verbs, which give rise to both the inhibited eventuality reading and the negated eventuality reading. Secondly, it is shown that, when these nominalizations co-occur with no , their lexical aspect is modified, as they share properties with events, but with states as well. Thirdly, a proposal of analysis for < no  + event deverbal nominalization> is presented. We claim that both the interpretation and lexical aspect of this construction follow from the interaction of negation with the syntactic configuration of the nominalization and, specifically, with the projection responsible for the triggering of the eventuality.

The article introduces an experimental study of glottal stops that are generated by h aspiré (H) in French ( il [ʔ] hoche la tête ). To date the phenomenon is merely mentioned in passing, and evidence only comes from native speaker intuitions and cursory personal observation. Participants pronounced verbs that either did ( hocher ) or did not ( aimer ) begin with an H, whereby the left context was controlled for: the preceding word could end in a vowel ( tu hoches / aimes ), in a consonant ( il hoche / aime ) or in a liaison consonant (LC nous hochons / aimons ). Results confirm the observation made in the literature regarding the high variability of H: lexical (elision is much more frequent in j’harcèle than in j’hais ), inter-speaker (some participants chose unelided je for 10 out of 12 H verbs, while others only for 4 H verbs) and intra-speaker (participants pronounced vous [z] hissez with liaison, while they chose je hisse in a multiple choice-based pretest). Results also confirmed that H is indeed a glottal stop creator: glottal stops occur much more often before H-initial than before V-initial words. The glottal stop rate also depended on the left context: while LC + H ( nous hochons ) and C + H ( il hoche ) are statistically indistinguishable, both are significantly distinct from V + H ( tu hoches ). This suggests that glottal stop insertion is sensitive to all types of preceding consonants, whether they are pronounced (C + H) or not (LC + H). This result is relevant in the debate on French liaison where it was claimed that (some) LCs are epenthetic, that is absent from phonological computation when unpronounced: this view is challenged by the experimental evidence. On the analytic side, the article argues that all glottal stops that occur stand in Strong Position, i.e. word-initially or after a consonant {#,C}__ (Ségéral, Philippe & Tobias Scheer. 2001. La Coda-Miroir. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 96. 107–152). The word-initial position is in fact domain-initial, and it is a long standing observation in the literature that H sets off its word into a separate domain. Thus even glottal stops in V + H ( tu hoches ) that appear to occur in intervocalic position may in fact be domain-initial V + [H]. The question then is what kind of domain could be responsible for the (rare) presence of glottal stops in V + V ( tu aimes ): such a domain V + [V] cannot stem from H, nor can it be of morpho-syntactic origin. It is argued that these domains are production planning domains in the sense of Wagner (2012. Locality in phonology and production planning. McGill Working Papers in Linguistics 22. 1–18 and following).

Chinese, a topic-prominent language, abounds with gapped and gapless topic constructions. Several explanations of how topics are derived have been proposed, which fall into three categories: the base-generation approach, the mixed approach and the movement approach. In this study, we conducted two experiments to examine the island sensitivity of topic constructions in Chinese, bringing novel evidence to adjudicate the different approaches to topicalization in this language. The results indicate that island effects can be detected in both gapped and gapless topic constructions, which supports the movement approach to topic constructions in Chinese, making influential hypotheses such as the topic licensing condition and the topic interpretation condition dubious. Our findings also provide new evidence for the influential proposal that Merge is applied freely (Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Michael Kenstowicz & Ken Hale (eds.), A life in language , 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Chomsky, Noam. 2004. Beyond explanatory adequacy. In Adriana Belletti (ed.), Structures and beyond: The cartography of syntactic structures , 104–131. New York: Oxford University Press, Chomsky, Noam. 2008. On phases. In Robert Freidin, Carlos Otero & Maria Luisa Zubizarreta (eds.), Foundational issues in linguistic theory: Essays in honor of Jean-Roger Vergnaud , 133–166. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Chomsky, Noam. 2013. Problems of projection. Lingua 130. 33–49).