Volume 25, Spring 2004

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    The semantics of the bare noun in Turkish*
    (University of Calgary, 2004-05) Bliss, Heather
    The goal of this paper is to investigate the semantic properties of the bare noun in Turkish. In this paper, the term bare noun refers to a noun phrase that consists only of a noun, without any modifying elements such as determiners, number marking, or case marking. The main argument of this thesis is that the bare noun is unique as compared to all other types of noun phrases in Turkish. As the following sections will illustrate, it is the only NP that is not specified for number, and it is the only NP that is obligatorily non-specific. I hypothesize that the fundamental difference between the bare noun and other NP types is that the maximal projection of the bare noun is a predicate, which is NP, whereas the maximal projection of other phrases is DP (Determiner Phrase).
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    Spanish rhymes: a challenge to constraints on syllable structure?
    (University of Calgary, 2004-05) González Poot, Antonio A
    A standard assumption in Onset/Rhyme theory is that, crosslinguistically, rhymes never license more than two position; the occurrence of additional segments is limited to word edges and licensing is carried out by higher prosodic units. Spanish three-positional word-medial rhymes seem to challenge this assumption. Furthermore, the third position in this transgressive syllable structure is systematically occupied by /s/, one of the only two segments of the Spanish phonemic inventory that can become invisible for matters of stress assignment. A closer look at the data reveals that this prima facie transgressive structure tends to occur at morpheme boundaries: few Spanish roots contain three-segmental rhymes. The systematic assignment of secondary stress on the prefix or the first member of compounds in which the transgressive rhyme is found, and the presence of primary stress on roots with three-segmental word-medial rhymes become crucial in an analysis that relies on a looser conception of extraprosodicity in order to account for the Spanish data: /s/ – the transgressing segment – is licensed by an available foot node projected by the stress bearing threesegmental rhyme.
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    Palatalization in Lakhota*
    (University of Calgary, 2004-05) Telfer, Corey
    This paper is an attempt to provide an analysis of palatalization in Lakhota, a process that is marked by some very peculiar phenomena. Both the vowels i and e appear to cause palatalization in Lakhota, but in entirely different environments. This ‘complementary distribution’ has led Shaw (1980) to suggest that this process was once unified and has since been fragmented into two distinct parts. The vowel e only causes palatalization in Lakhota if it is derived from the vowel /a/ by ablaut, a vowel change caused by certain enclitics. A remarkable feature of ablaut is that it is limited to the combination of specific stems with specific enclitics, indicating that it is morphologically regulated. This analysis investigates the historical sources of both ablaut and palatalization, and determines that ablauting /a/ descends from Proto-Siouan *i and *e. Based on Shaw’s suggestion that palatalization was once a unified process, an account of palatalization and ablaut is given for the various stages of the history of Lakhota. This analysis makes use of Vowel Place Theory, Combinatorial Specification and phonologically conditioned allomorphy in order to account for both the historical and the modern data.