Volume 29, Fall 2016

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    Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 29, Fall 2016
    (University of Calgary, 2016) Lee, JeongEun; Burkinshaw, Kelly; Chow, Una Y.; Windsor, Joseph W.
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    Mismatches between European Portuguese lexical and phonological words
    (University of Calgary, 2016) Burkinshaw, Kelly D.
    This paper analyzes sandhi phenomena in European Portuguese in which coda consonants in word-final position are resyllabified to become onsets in two ways: by epenthesis when they occur at utterance boundaries (excluding /ʃ/), and by associating with following onsetless words (within the same utterance). I present an Optimality Theoretic account for why this resyllabification occurs, which includes a constraint against assigning moras to consonants (*Cμ), and a constraint against having codas (NO-CODA). These constraints work together to produce the facts we see in the European Portuguese data: /ɾ/ and /l/, which I argue are moraic codas, are resyllabified in both environments mentioned above, but /ʃ/, which I argue is a non-moraic coda, is only resyllabified utterance-medially before onsetless words. I then discuss the ramifications that resyllabification across word boundaries has for the relationship between syntactic and phonological words, with reference to Selkirk’s (2011a; 2011b) Match Theory; although there is correspondence between words on these two levels, those corresponding items need not consist of exactly the same number of segments.
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    Contrast, phonological features, and phonetic implementation: Aspiration in Blackfoot
    (University of Calgary, 2016) Windsor, Joey
    Blackfoot is generally regarded as lacking phonological contrasts based on laryngeal settings; it is typically analyzed as lacking aspiration, voiced obstruents, and the segment [h] (see Elfner 2006 or Frantz 2009). The simple fact that Blackfoot sonorants appear as voiced and obstruents as voiceless could be the result of redundancy rules (cf. Stanley 1967) or phonetic implementation rather than phonological contrast (Keyser & Stevens 2006; Stevens & Keyser 2010). However, at the end of an orthographic word, vowels in Blackfoot typically devoice such that “there can be no contrast between short and long vowels at the end of a word” (Frantz 2009:5, see also Gick et al 2012). In this study, I examine whether Blackfoot final vowel devoicing —what I argue is better characterized as aspiration— is the result of phonological specification or phonetic implementation. I argue that the laryngeal feature [SPREAD GLOTTIS] is contrastive in Blackfoot and that the phonetic implementation of this feature leads to phonological opacity and a near-merger of phonemically short and long vowels in a phonological phrase-final position such that they are perceptually identical (Frantz & Russell 1995).
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    L2 transfer of stress, tones, and intonation from Mandarin: A case study
    (University of Calgary, 2016) Chow, Una Y.
    This study examined the prosodic patterns of Mandarin, Cantonese, and English in order to address the question: Will a native speaker of Mandarin acquire Cantonese intonation more easily than English intonation? According to the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (Eckman 1997), second language (L2) features that are universally rarer than the first language (L1) features will create difficulty for L2 acquisition. English has word stress, Cantonese has lexical tones, and Mandarin has both. English has more variation in word stress patterns than Mandarin, and Cantonese has more lexical tones than Mandarin. The prediction was that a Mandarin speaker would have difficulty in acquiring English stress and Cantonese tones. In a field study, I elicited speech samples from a female, adult native speaker of Mandarin who learned Cantonese and English from age 5-6. My pitch analysis of her speech revealed near native-like intonation patterns in English. In Cantonese, however, her declarative questions reflected an overall raise in pitch range, characteristic of her Mandarin questions. My results demonstrated that the consultant showed more difficulty in her acquisition of the native intonation of Cantonese than that of English. The implication is that lexical tones interfere with L2 intonation more so than word stress, because both lexical tones and intonation rely on fundamental frequency (F0) as a primary cue.
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    Subject contact relatives: A cross-dialectal approach
    (University of Calgary, 2016) Williamson, Sara
    This paper advances a Minimalist structural account of subject contact relatives, such as I met a man _ can speak five languages, which are common to Belfast English and Ulster Scots but unacceptable in Standard British and North American Englishes. Previous accounts have treated these constructions as restrictive relatives (Doherty 1993) or topic-comment structures (Henry 1995). However, such approaches fail to describe the full range of syntactic and pragmatic restrictions affecting subject contact relatives; moreover, these studies have neglected dialectal differences in contact relative distribution. This paper treats subject contact relatives as TopicP constructions with null (or optionally resumptive) subjects but overt topics. These constructions are noted to be restricted to syntactic predicates that serve a presentational function in the discourse. Further, syntactic and pragmatic variations in the composition of TopicP engender the observed dialectal differences in subject contact relative distribution across Belfast English, Ulster Scots, and standard English.