UiL-OTS (Linguistcs)

A case of exceptional assignment of prosody to loanwords is considered. In Serbo-Croatian, where in loanwords the original position of stress is generally preserved in some way, a small class of Latinate adjectives (e.g. Elementaarna ‘elementary’ and pEsonaalna ‘personal’) become toneless e.g. they display the postcyclic initial falling accent. An account of these data is proposed which combines a new approach to postcyclic prosody, which is shown to go hand in hand with syntactically opaque structures, and a new model of loanword integration, which views the loanword trajectory as lexicalisation. As a result, an enriched theory of both domains and their interaction arises to account for the data and shed some additional light on the position of loanwords in the architecture of the grammar/lexicon.


Keywords: loanword integration, postcyclic prosody, prosody/syntax interface, morphology,
lexicon

The goal of this contribution is to revisit the treatment of loanwords in generative linguistics and propose a radically different loanword research agenda. The central insight highlighted here is that a comprehensive theory of loanword integration has to look beyond sound correspondences between before/after forms (which are constructed for the purpose of analysing loanword treatment as a special case of grammar) and acknowledge that the borrowing process produces a new lexical item of the borrowing language based on an input which usually consists of a single surface form. As a result, the cases of so-called morphological adaptation, which are presently seldom discussed by loanword adaptation researches, receive a central role in the novel approach. This move makes loanwords less amenable to analysis in terms of “general” tools of grammar, but it opens up the possibility of an insightful interaction between the studies of loanword behaviour and the architecture of grammar. In order to illustrate this, I am discussing a process whose analysis necessitates a broader picture – “excess” consonantal gemination in loanwords, attested in various languages (e.g. Finnish piknikki “picnic”) and used on various occasions as external evidence within the generative discourse.

2 3 Acknowledgements First I would like to thank my all-round supervisor René Kager for all the support I have received from him in the two years of my MA and especially during the laborious period of thesis-writing. René's expertise and dedication were constantly providing me with an excellent model for my own work. Many ideas expressed in this thesis are the result of the inspiring discussions we have had in the last months. I would also like to thank my second reader Marc van Oostendorp for all the lively discussions of various versions of my model and for bringing many new facets of language phenomena to my attention. I'm also thankful to Nuffic for awarding me an HSP scholarship and enabling my stay in the Netherlands.

Introduction. This contribution builds on Van Oostendorp (1998) and works out the idea that styles and registers of one language (informal, formal, etc.) represent related systems and not self-contained consistent grammars, sitting one next to the other. There are several reasons to reject this latter idea. First, this move would allow us to simplify the set of assumptions that we need on the acquisition side (avoid an "empowered" logical problem of language acquisition). Second, on the empirical/typological side, it helps us block some unlikely overgeneralizations and make inconsistent that two registers would differ from one another like any two grammars can. We want to preserve, embed and, possibly, predict that there is connection holding between the registers of the same language.

"The goal of this contribution is twofold. On the one hand, I am looking at the “normative” continuum (comparable to crazy – awkward/weird – strange – peculiar – normal – common in English) in Serbian and Dutch, in an attempt to identify the main similarities and differences using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2002). On the other hand, I am proposing moving away from the comparison paradigm. Instead, I am developing an account approaching languages diffractively (Barad 2007), as an ongoing intra-action. Under such an approach, the role of the practices of the (broadly defined) bilingual speaker changes radically: the speaker is invited to live the difference productively and to overcome the ideology of sameness and representationalism. The bilingual speaker is always consigned to being more-than-normal and accountable for how she speaks the constitutive boundary.
But there is more. The goal of this contribution is to spoil othering/normativity/universality for you, strategically using the insight that not only are different things “crazy” in different discourses, but also the very scale of measuring “crazy” is discourse/language-specific and ever-becoming. In this sense, there is no transcendental norm(ality) to measure against, only what we make of what has been entrusted to us."

This contribution is challenging the traditional concept that languages in contact are separate (or separable) entities. An alternative model is proposed, inspired by an approach from science and technology studies: agential realism (Barad 2007). The central concept is that of inter-language mappings, the correspondences between structures of languages which get stabilised in the contact speakers’ community and make whole subsets of the source language lexicon in principle borrowable and potentially already borrowed. Importantly, the inter-language mappings cannot be properly assigned to any of the languages in contact and they enforce a profound rethinking of the way the most important processes of language contact - borrowing and code-switching - are conceptualised. Using examples from a variety of languages, I am showing how borrowing needs to be conceptualised not as adaptation to a new system, but as creation of a relation which cannot be properly situated in any of the varieties in contact.

 Physical facts, like the acoustic salience of stridents or lack of salience of schwas, seem to play a role in shaping constraint ranking, but we argue that this is not part of UG, this is a consequence of how the UR is extracted from the acoustic signal (cf. Hayes 1997).

"Fleeting or Simply not There?: A Generative Analysis of the „Fleeting a“ Alternations in Serbo-Croatian

In this contribution, the Serbo-Croatian vowel:zero alternation, traditionally termed Fleeting/Wobbly a (nepostojano a) is considered. The proposed analysis, de-veloped for nouns and adjectives and couched in terms of OptimalityTheory, brings a conceptual separation of the fleeting a which surfaces in bare forms (e.g. članak „article.Nom.Sg“and tanak „thin.Masc.Nom.Sg“) from that in genitive plural forms (e.g. članaka „article.Gen.Pl“ and banaka „bank.Gen.Pl“).  Although both a's are inserted into stems (which do not contain them: /člank/, /tank/, /bank/), this happens under different conditions for both. The first a is epenthetic, inserted to prevent word-final complex codas from surfacing. This epenthesis is entirely phonological, occurs in all native stems and all the ex-ceptions can be accounted for using a special FAITHFULNESS constraint for loanwords:FAITH(LOAN). The other a is methatetic and gets inserted because the genitive plural suffix has the form /aːaː/, which makes metathesis the preferred outcome in combinations of the type /člank+aː aː/.
The metathetic a, unlike the epenthetic counterpart, occurs in contexts defined by lexical and morphological factors, mainly the shape of the paradigm in which the form occurs. The discussion of the specific con-texts in which the two types of fleeting a occur, will demonstrate the usefulness of the lexical constraint family LEXICAL CONSERVATISM (Steriade 1997), which militates against the introduction of new allomorphs into the paradigm. Moreover, the discussion of some specific issues will lead us to register at least two phenomena which could show restructuring with respect to the situation described in the standard grammars. First, the option for the suffix /aːaː/ to have the just the exponent –a seems to have disappeared for feminine nouns (e.g. forms such as svâdbā „wedding.Gen.Pl“, vóžnjā „drive.Gen.Pl“ have become ungrammatical). Second, the sequences which the grammar previously treated as single segments ([st], [ʃt], [zd] and [ʒd]) are losing the single segment status and becoming real clusters. "

Standard language awareness of the language community – the
case of Serbian in Serbia

The objective of this research is to map out the effects of the standardization
process in terms of the standard language awareness created in the language
community. Standardization is regarded as a type of communication, whereby the
standardization organ (the authorized institution) communicates the norm to the
language community by means of the channel of standardization, which can be
direct (e.g. written prescriptive work) and indirect (through reference to «model»
local dialects or concrete language use).
There were three groups
of subjects: students of non-philological disciplines from: 1) Belgrade,
2) Vojvodina, 3) other parts of Serbia. It was relevant to analyze results of the
research in reference to the fact that there are two prestige centers (in accordance
with two mentioned Universities) and two different (competitive) prestige regions
(standards).

P h o n e t i c s , p h o n o l o g y a n d t h e i n v a r i a n t A n t o n i o B a r o n i * & M a r k o S i m o n o v i ć°* D I S L L , U n i v e r s i t à d e g l i S t u d i d i P a d o v a , I t a l y °U i L O T S , U t r e c h t U n i v e r s i t y , t h e N e t h e r l a n d s A P A P -L u b l i n , P o l a n d 2 1 -2 3 J U n e 2 0 1 3 REDUCTION PHENOMENA (the traditional account)