Volume 05, Spring 1979

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    Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 5, Spring 1979
    (University of Calgary, 1979-05) O'Grady, William D.
    This issue is the fifth in the series of working papers published by LOGOS, the Student Linguistics Society at the University of Calgary. The series provides a vehicle for faculty members and students to publish current research. These papers represent research in progress and are not to be considered final statements by the authors. The appearance of these articles in the current issue does not preclude their publication in altered form elsewhere.
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    Loss and restoration of word final vowels in Spanish
    (University of Calgary, 1979-05) Anderson, James M
    The process of apocope in Medieval Spanish offers a glimpse into the interaction of structural and sociological constraints on linguistic behavior. Of the word final unstressed vowels /e/, /o/ and /a/, the twelfth and thirteenth century Spanish /e/, and less often /o/ were effaced exposing new consonants and consonant clusters. Written documentation of the period clearly indicates the loss of the vowel in environments where Modern Spanish has sustained the loss and in others where it has not, cf. Latin panem > Old Spanish pan, Modern Spanish pan. and Latin noctem > Old Spanish noch (in texts), Modern Spanish noche. By the fifteenth century, apocoped vowels were restored except after dental consonants, i.e., /l, r, s, n, ć (>θ), d/. The loss and subsequent restoration of these vowels appears to reflect syntagmatic, sociological and paradigmatic aspects of language function. To what extent can these factors be isolated, and their relative influence examined?
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    Classifiers and subject prefix alternation in Athapaskan
    (University of Calgary, 1979-05) Henry, Dave
    The basic sentence structure in Athapaskan is subject-object-verb, as illustrated in Hare. The verb is inflected for aspect and subject agreement. If the object of a transitive verb is not stated as an independent NP and the subject is third person, the verb is also inflected for object agreement. Because the subject is third person the object is expressed by the 'obviative' or 'fourth person.
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    Particle -sya in Russian: mystery, or defunct grammatical relation?*
    (University of Calgary, 1979-05) Hitch, Douglas A
    In this paper, through the framework of Relational Grammar (RG), I indicate how the appearance of the Russian particle -sya is syntactically predictable in a much broader range of instances than has been generally thought. Due to limitations of space, the discussions here are too brief to give a thorough accounting of every instance of -sya. However, I believe that the processes and principles outlined here can be applied to all instances successfully.
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    That's something that I wouldn't want to have to account for, is a sentence like this one*
    (University of Calgary, 1979-05) Jehn, Richard Douglas
    The grammar of focus phenomena in English has come under intensive investigation in recent years and this research has provided much in the way of explanation for structures which had previously been little understood, e.g. cleft constructions, topicalization, etc. There is, however, at least one type of focus construction which seems to pattern like pseudo-cleft sentences, but which has been neglected in the literature. This paper outlines the most apparent aspects of the syntactic and semantic behaviour of the construction in question and presents a tentative proposal for its incorporation into the grammar of English following the framework of the revised extended standard theory (Chomsky 1975, 1977a; Chomsky and Lasnik 1977).