Morphophonology

This article proposes a new formal reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) nouns containing the suffix *–oi–. I argue that both primary and non-primary derivatives in this class had stress alternating between the derivational suffix and the following inflectional ending (e.g., ACC.SG *[-óy-ṃ] vs. GEN *[-y-ós]) rather than the "amphikinetic" alternation between root and inflectional ending (ACC.SG *[´-oy-ṃ] vs. GEN *[-y-ós]) that is traditionally assumed for all primary nominals with suffixal *[o]-vocalism under the widely accepted “Erlangen Model” (Schindler 1975a,b, Rix 1992) of Indo-European morphophonology. Support for this alternative reconstruction comes from Hittite, which confirms that the suffixal stress seen in the Greek reflex of this noun class was inherited from PIE rather than root stress as in Vedic Sanskrit. More broadly, I contend that an adequate account of the prosodic behavior of PIE *–oi-stems requires (i) abandoning the traditional connection between suffixal *[o]-grade and "amphikinetic" word stress; and (ii) adopting a framework (such as the one articulated by Kiparsky 2010) in which the suffix's capacity to attract stress in both primary and non-primary derivation can be modeled in a unified way.

В справочнике представлены теория огласовок, именное и глагольное словообразование и словоизменение, а также новые правила «полного написания» в соответствии с решениями Академии языка иврит. В ряде случаев авторы справочника предлагают свой вариант коррекции отдельных правил, чтобы упростить или обобщить изложение.

Although the sound change w>y in Biblical Hebrew is well -
known, it has not received significant attention until now. This
paper provides a synchronic analysis to this phenomenon. The shift
is partly morphologically, partly phonologically conditioned.
Focusing on the phonological conditioning, the author describes the
exact environments of the change and suggests an explanation.
While weakening of w appears between vowel and consonant, w>y
occurs in the complementary set of environments: initial,
postconsonantal and possibly between vowels. This conditioning
and other phonological facts suggest that w>y is a strengthening. It
is thus necessary to distinguish this process from the regular
syncope of w which is morphologically, rather than
morphophonologically, conditioned.

This contribution discusses the morphophonemic aspect of the causative derivation in Harari. Harari is a South Ethiosemitic language related to the East Gurage group.1 The paper identifies that the causative is a morphological derivation involving two main prefixes, a- and at- which are generally used in the derivation of the direct and indirect causatives, respectively. The prefix a- basically attaches to intransitive verbs, and at- to the basic and derived transitive stems. The selection of the prefixes in the causative derivation is, however, not always predictable from either the transitivity or the lexical semantic of the verbs. The determination as to which causative prefix is used is also phonologically constrained. The paper also describes the characteristic morphophonemics of the two causative derivations by examining the verb typology and the conjugation of the causative verb.

By years passed, not only new words, but also phrases have been created. It is because the language has been changing from time to time. There are many variations in language features such as morphological, semantic, phonetic, and syntactic features. This paper will discuss the morphophonemic changes in derivational English suffix -ion. The consideration of choosing the topic is because affixation is the commonest way of building new words in language. Besides of that, suffix, which is one of the types of affixes, is used in many English words. This paper focuses on verbs as the stems. The aim of this paper is to explain what morphophonemic processes involved in the affixation -ion.

The appearance of new verbal paradigms in the Romance languages – namely, the synthetic future indicative and conditional paradigms – has been one of the hallmark studies within the field of grammaticalization. Already existing in Latin was a synthetic future indicative paradigm, with a full complement of endings. Many researchers (Garey 1955; Hopper and Traugott 2003; Slobbe 2004; among others) have agreed that the infinitive + HABĒRE construction was the genesis of Romance future paradigms, obviating and completely replacing the disfavored Latin synthetic future. However, even after Latin evolved into Spanish, there still existed a duality between a periphrastic, analytic future and a paradigmatic, synthetic future. Said duality implied several syntactic and morphophonological characteristics of Old and Classical Spanish, some of which are no longer extant in the modern language. Through an empirical study, employing variable rules analyses, of Old and Classical Spanish texts, it is shown that the synthetic and analytic future and conditional were not always fully complementary of another, as the synthetic began to be used in contexts customarily reserved for the analytic construction.
Within this work it will be shown how morphophonological and syntactic properties necessitated the existence of the analytic construction, especially the status of the auxiliary-turned-affix-turned-inflectional ending haber. Also of interest will be the manner in which the future and conditional paradigms derived syntactically in Old and Classical Spanish, with special attention lent to the role of cliticization principles in their structure. The findings rooted in these several theoretical fields will import a greater understanding of the eventual loss of the analytic future and conditional prior to the advent of the Modern Spanish era.

Explaining the “Natural Order of L2 Morpheme Acquisition” in English: A Meta-analysis of Multiple Determinants ... Multiple regression analysis showed that a very large portion of the total variance in acquisition order is explained by the combination of the five determinants. ...

本稿の目的は，現代日本語（共通語）における「した」を形態論，活用論の観点から見た際の問題点について，先行研究と関連現象を中心に整理することである。具体的には，A) 現代日本語（共通語）のタ形の形態論的性質をアクセントの観点から分析しているOshima (2014)とその批判が提案されているNishiyama (2016)の議論を概観・整理し，B) タ（形）の扱いについて形態論的な観点から問題提起をしている岩崎 (2000)の主張をどのように位置付けることができるのか整理・検討する。

Spoken Israeli Hebrew (SIH) includes many traces of ancient phases of Hebrew, whose sources have been long lost, resulting in complicated phenomena. This paper wishes to synchronically describe the morphophonological system which regularize such phenomena in the verbal roots, and which make it possible for an infant in an Israeli Hebrew environment to acquire its complex phonology and verbal morphology.

This paper pours into a significant gap in the description of the mechanism which produces common everyday verbs, fluent in Israeli Hebrew speakers, by describing the set of morphophonemes and their function as root-components in Spoken Israeli Hebrew. This gap in morphological research of the majority of SIH verbs, is the result of  the focus of verbal morphology research of the last decades on coining new verbs, mainly denominatives*  – and not on the very different mechanism producing root-based verbs (Arad 2007: §6-7).

This paper presents the morphophonological analysis principles, which enable the analysis of phenomena involving both phonology and morphology. As part of the morphophonological analysis method, we define the morphophonemes which serve as root-components in SIH and present in detail their phonemic realizations in different morphophonological environments in the inflection of verb paradigms. This study was based on verbs from recorded SIH texts, taken from the Corpus of the Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH) project (Hary & Izre'el 2002; Izre'el & Rahav 2004), with Hebrew and phonetic transcriptions.

Special attention is paid to the issues of 'BeKeF' consonants and 'defective' roots, whose realizations and effect on their environments are explained morphophonologically. In addition, solutions are suggested to the phenomena of variations in the pronunciation of verbs, and finally additional issues are suggested for further study.

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* Ornan 1971, 1993; Bolozky in his many papers, among which are 1978, 2007; Bat-El 1986, 1996; Berman 1987, 1989; Ravid 1990; Nir 1993; Ossishkin 1999; Schwarzwald 2000; and many others, and cf. Izre'el 2006: 118-119.

En recuerdo de María Beatriz Fontanella de Weinberg, quien creyó firmemente en la trascendencia del estudio de la evolución de la lengua española trasplantada a América y puso un enorme esfuerzo personal en la consctrucción de la lingüística hispánica con un trabajo serio y duradero y una vida entregada hasta el último aliento.

This thesis presents a descriptive study of the phonetics, phonology and morphology of Nuer. It contributes to the study of the language by dealing with the phenomena that has little or no previous description.
I provide a descriptive account of the phonological processes in Nuer covering the full range of the segmental and suprasegmental categories in the language. I present the first descriptive account of tone in disyllabic verbs, postulate three tonemes /H, M, L/ and describe one sandhi process that turns the second subsequent H tone into L. In addition, I provide a description of floating suprasegmental features.
Because the phonological parameters are also employed to encode morphology, I further distinguish the processes that are morphologically motivated. These are termed ‘stem alternations’. The major alternations are the changes in vowel and voice quality. I propose to analyse them in terms of morphologically motivated system of vowel grades. I also deal with stem alternations in tone, vowel length and stem-final consonant.
Verb categories that I consider in this thesis are transitive bases and their various derivations. I show that verb derivation distinguishes verbal number and valence increase and decrease. I present a number of verb categories that have not been previously described for Nuer, some of which are typologically rare. Such is the marked verbal number category which can derive either a multiplicative verb or a punctual verb, depending on the inherent semantics of the lexeme. Another category is the associated motion verb. I show that this category alone has an additional verbal number contrast that I describe as ‘neutral’.
I argue that in order to understand the morphophonological alternations in Nuer verb paradigms we must draw a distinction between the processes that occur in inflection and in derivation.
I conclude that the morphophonological alternations are regular and largely predictable provided we view them as changes of semi-independent parameters (e.g. vowel length, vowel grade, tone, stem-final consonant).

This module presents an introduction to English morphophonemics. Sound structure (phonology) and word structure (morphology) are two of the main components of a language system. However, many a times, these systems interact and affect each other in some interesting ways and give rise to a phenomenon which is known as ‘morphophonemics’ Sometimes, due to this interaction, pronunciation of a morpheme may get modified or completely changed. These changes may be regular or irregular and usually are context sensitive in nature. In ‘morphophonemics’, we specifically study the changes which occur at the margins/boundaries of morphemes. There are many glossaries, lectures, notes and other reference materials available over the internet for further studies in this area. Some of the pioneer reference works are also listed in the reference section.

This study aims to analyze and describe the morphemic and phonemic structures of verbs and nouns in a research abstract as source of data. The morphemic structure analysis focuses on the free-bound morphemic affixations of English verbs and nouns while the morphophonemic analysis focuses on the allomorph variations of the inflectional morphemes in English verbs and nouns. Findings of the study reveal that majority of the verbs used in the research abstract have inflectional type of affixations where a bound morpheme is added to the stem as suffix. These morphemes mark tense and number of verbs. The nouns, on the other hand, generally have derivational affixation that involves appending of suffixes to the verb form to derive the noun form. This study affirms that English verbs and nouns generally have inflectional suffixes to mark grammatical categories such as tense and number. In another note, both of the verbs and nouns with inflectional morphemes undergo phonological modifications in terms of their allomorphic variants. The allomorphs [s], [z] and [iz] of the morpheme{s} are used to mark number in nouns and tense in verbs while the allomorphs [d], [ǝd] and [t] of the morpheme {d} mark the tense in regular verbs with inflectional morphemes. The allomorphs in both verbs and nouns involve voicing assimilation and dissimilation as phonological processes. The implications of the findings of the study would be that second language learners of English need to familiarize the morphemic structure of words as they can be very helpful in understanding the meanings of words. Moreover, they have to familiarize the environments where the allomorphic variants of inflectional morphemes are realized so that they would be able to pronounce the words correctly. Such interaction of morphology and phonology can cause learning difficulty for second language learners of English whose first language, like the Cebuano Visayan, is sounded as spelled and is contrary to English which has allophonic and allomorphic variants occurring in words. The analysis can, therefore, be helpful to teachers in identifying areas of difficulty in learning a second language.

This dissertation provides a description of the Chácobo language, a southern Pano language spoken by approximately 1200 people who live close to or on the Geneshuaya, Ivon, Benicito and Yata rivers in the northern Bolivian Amazon. The grammatical description emerges out of an ethnographically based documentation project of the language. Chapter 1 contains an overview of the cultural context in which the Chácobo language is embedded and a brief ethnohistory of the Chácobo people. I also discuss the general methodology of the dissertation touching specifically on issues related to data collection. Chapter 2 introduces the phonology of the language focusing on the categories necessary for its description. Chapter 3 provides a discussion of morphosyntactic structures and relations. This chapter provides a discussion of how head-dependent relations and the general distinction between morphology and syntax are understood throughout the dissertation. Parts of speech classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) are also defined and motivated based on semantic and formal criteria. Chapter 4 describes predication and its relationship to clause-typing. Chapter 5 is concerned with constituency which refers to hierarchical structures motivated through distributional properties and relations and the relative degree of contiguity between linguistic categories. Chapter 6 provides an extensive discussion of morphophonology and its relation to constituency. Chapter 7 and 8 are concerned with the language’s alignment and valence-adjusting systems. The next five chapters provide a description of the functional domains relevant to the verbal domain including; Tense (Chapter 9); Temporal distance (Chapter 10); Aspect (Chapter 11); Associated Motion (Chapter 12); Perspective (Chapter 13). The last two Chapters focus on categories in the nominal domain. Chapter 14 provides a description of noun compounding, adjectives and possession. Chapter 15 provides a description of number, quantification and deixis inside and outside the nominal domain.

This dissertation develops optimality-theoretic analyses of word-level stress assignment in two languages with lexical accent, Cupeño (Takic, Uto-Aztecan) and Hittite (Anatolian, Indo-European); it also assesses the implications of word stress in Hittite and the other Anatolian languages for the reconstruction of stress assignment in Proto-Indo European.

I argue that stress assignment in Cupeño is governed by the BASIC ACCENTUATION PRINCIPLE (BAP; Kiparsky and Halle 1977): stress is assigned to the leftmost lexically accented morpheme, else to the word’s left edge. This analysis is compared to that of Alderete (2001), who
argues that Cupeño shows accentual root faithfulness — i.e., that the accentual properties of roots are privileged over non-root morphemes. I show that the BAP analysis is both simpler and attains greater empirical coverage than the root faithfulness analysis, which fails to account for certain attested stress patterns that are captured under the BAP analysis. Thus reanalyzed, Cupeño has two important typological implications. First, without support from Cupeño, root faithfulness may be unattested as a feature of lexical accent systems. Second, Cupeño provides a clear typological parallel for the ancient IE languages on the basis of which the BAP was posited — in particular, Vedic Sanskrit — as well as for Hittite, where I argue that it is also operative.

The analysis of Hittite stress advanced in this dissertation is the first systematic attempt at a synchronic generative treatment of its word stress patterns. Having established that stress assignment in Hittite inflection is governed by the BAP, I also adduce evidence for accentual dominance —  i.e., morphemes whose accentual specification “overrides” the BAP. I propose that accentual dominance in Hittite is a consequence of morphological headedness: the lexical accent of the word’s head morpheme is privileged in Hittite, just as Revithiadou (1999) has argued for other lexical accent systems.

Finally, this dissertation addresses the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word-prosodic system. Hittite and the other Anatolian languages are not traditionally viewed as important sources for the reconstruction of this system; however, I contend that the BAP is reconstructible for PIE and that — against this traditional view — this reconstruction depends crucially on the Anatolian evidence, which converges with Vedic Sanskrit in this respect.

En esta presentación se examina el estatus gramatical de los elementos antepuestos a los sustantivos y de los elementos pospuestos a los predicados, los sustantivos poseídos y los pronombres enfáticos, que en algunos estudios previos se han analizado como "clasificadores nominales". En primer lugar, analizo la morfofonología de los sustantivos compuestos y demuestro que hay dos tipos de compuestos que se distinguen por su integración fonológica, semántica y sintáctica, y que una parte de los "clasificadores" entran en el compuesto más sintáctico ("flojo") mientras no la otra. En segundo lugar, analizo la distribución sintáctica de los elementos pospuestos y demuestro que solamente los elementos que denotan seres humanos y animales ("enclíticos clasificatorios") tienen un estatus gramatical paralelo a los enclíticos de persona/número, mientras otros elementos ("sustantivos genéricos") se repiten como una característica discursiva y no como pronombres. En conclusión, "clasificadores nominales" como se han analizado en algunos estudios previos no existen como una categoría gramatical coherente.

Morphophonemic changes are the morphological and phonological changes that take place in a single word due to plural, case, tense, or gender. The current paper elaborates on this interconnection from an Arabic perspective, by considering the issue of morphophonemic changes in Standard Arab as a process that involves significant changes in the various irregular patterns of plural. It draws on the structure of Arabic mainly phonology and morphology, and therefore it focuses on irregular plural which has many forms. First, the paper introduces plural in Arabic, by elaborating on its various forms. Then, the paper classifies irregular plural. Finally, the paper suggests a few conclusions and recommendation

Esta obra se acerca a cuestiones que atañen al ámbito morfológico en su relación con el E/LE. No es un manual generalista sobre morfología y E/LE, sino un compendio de artículos que, partiendo de diferentes perspectivas, busca abrir puertas en este campo: desde precisiones sobre cuestiones de adquisición de lenguas segundas hasta propuestas concretas de actividades para el aula; desde la presentación de problemas que ofrecen las unidades morfológicas del español hasta reflexiones sobre la (in)adecuación de diversos acercamientos a la reflexión gramatical en el E/LE; desde panorámicas sobre el camino seguido por la indagación morfológica en metodología con corrientes hoy ya desfasadas hasta ajustadas presentaciones de las propuestas teóricas y pedagógicas más en boga en los últimos años.

"本文着重探讨木里水田话声调系统。水田话的声调变化起重要的语法作用。
This article presents the tonal system of Laze, a.k.a. Muli Shuitian, a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Sichuan. It is structured in terms of H(igh), M(id) and L(ow) levels, like in the closely related languages Naxi and Na. Tone sandhi plays a morphosyntactic role in Laze. There exist four lexical tones for Laze monosyllables: H, M, L and MH; in theory, this could yield as many as sixteen tone patterns over disyllables, but fewer are observed. The present research places special emphasis on (i) tonal changes in the combination of verbs with clitics: productive, synchronic sandhi rules, and (ii) tonal changes accompanying the lexicalization of compound nouns and of predicates made up of a noun plus a verb."

Strong Endings; 690 102 entries in -ional. Neutral except nation [eɪ]  national [ae] 62 entries left, 42 cases with no stress shift, but: procedure [iː]  procedural [iː] femur [iː]  femoral [e] nature [eɪ]  natural [ae] ephemera [e]/[iː]  ephemeral [e]/[iː] zenith [e]/[iː]  zenithal [e]/[iː] No stress shift might indicate the neutrality of -al if -VCal  /(-)100/ : ˌarchˈduke

It is widely thought that (i) Proto-Indo-European had *-mon-stem nominals formed by internal derivation from neuter *-men-stems and that (ii) these *-mon-stems were characterized by "amphikinetic" inflection, thus stressed full-grade of the root in their strong case forms (*R(é)-mon-). This paper challenges the latter claim, arguing that these forms instead had stem-final stress (*R(e)-món-). I adduce prosodic evidence in support of this alternative reconstruction from Lithuanian, Greek, Hittite, and above all Vedic Sanskrit, where the attested reflexes of these *-mon-stems consistently show stem-final stress. I then propose a new account of their root full-grade, which on this new reconstruction is phonologically irregular, since it surfaces in a pretonic syllable. I contend that this full-grade was synchronically transferred from their neuter *-men-stem bases. In this respect, internally derived *-mon-stems are shown to pattern morphophonologically with other reconstructible non-primary derivatives, which similarly acquire their root vocalism from their derivational bases.

The two languages presented in this paper are Jimi and Sharwa, both classified in the Bata group of Chadic Biu-Mandara A (NEWMAN 1977b, GRAVINA 2007).
Jimi is spoken around the town of Bourrha in the Mayo-Tsanaga division of the Far North region of Cameroon. Sharwa is spoken in an area to the south of the Jimi language area, still within the Mayo-Tsanaga division. The main Sharwa town is Tchévi. The number of speakers for each language is estimated to be around 5,000 (GORDON & GRIMES 2005; BRYE & BRYE 2002, 2003).
According to lexicostatistics (BARRETEAU 1987), Jimi is most closely related to Gude, with a figure of 82% similarity. Sharwa is most similar to Tsuvan, with a figure of 81% similarity. Jimi and Sharwa have around 76% similarity.
The data for this paper was obtained during sessions aimed at elaborating a practical orthography for each of these languages. Thanks go to Father Gabriel Djibi (Jimi) and to Miss Oukedina Hadjaratou (Sharwa) for their help. For Jimi, there is also a Jimi-French dictionary (around 1,300 entries) published by the Catholic Church in Bourrha.

Patterns of morphological complexity in western Amazonian languages offer a range of challenges to our typological and theoretical understanding, while at the same time suggesting an areal component to their maintenance and development. In this chapter, we investigate the relationship between morphological complexity and historical processes of language contact and change across this region. We turn first to an exploration of morphological proliferation in particular domains (nominal classification, tense, evidentiality, and valence-adjusting) across unrelated western Amazonian languages, and consider how this relates to other measures of complexity; we follow this with a more systematic exploration of morphological complexity across a sample of eleven western Amazonian languages, and compare these results to measures of wordhood status across these languages. We argue that a large percentage of bound morphemes in these languages display ambiguity between morphotactic versus syntactic analyses, such that the overall distinction between morphology and syntax in these languages is a relatively weak one. This observation suggests that morphological autonomy is best characterized as a matter of degree, and that different degrees of autonomy may apply on a regional scale. Since many accounts of word-internal morphological complexity implicitly rely on notions of autonomy, Amazonian languages invite a revision of our current conception of this domain.

Semitic morphology is notorious for its use of ablaut (vowel alternations). This paper provides a synchronic analysis to the ablaut in the verbal system of Biblical Hebrew. The classical literature on the subject assumes that vocalic modifications are lexical, idiosyncratic. On the contrary, the approach developed here suggests that the vowels involved are linked sequentially throughout the derivations according to a fixed and predictable order. This gradation is identical to that brought out in several studies on various Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European languages. However, evidence shows that the alternations of one verbal stem are nevertheless lexical.

The aim of this paper is to offer an analysis of the well-known metathesis process of the sibilant+dental stops clusters in the reflexive/passive verbal forms of Ancient Aramaic and Ancient Hebrew. This process will not be considered as a proper feature of Aramaic and Hebrew: it will be integrated into the more general discussion on extrasyllabicity and on special status of the coronal obstruents at word edges

In this dissertation, I address the question of domains within grammar: i.e. how domains are defined, whether different components of grammar make references to the same boundaries (or at least boundary definers), and whether these boundaries are uniform with respect to different processes. I address these questions in two case studies. First, I explore compound nouns in Icelandic and restrictions on their composition, where inflected non-head elements are structurally peripheral to uninflected ones. I argue that these effects are due to a matching condition which requires elements within compounds to match their attachment site in terms of size/type. Following that I explore how morphophonology is regulated by the structure of the compound. I argue for a contextual definition of the domain of morphophonology, where the highest functional morpheme in the extended projection of the root marks the boundary. Under this approach a morphophonological domain can contain smaller domains analogous to phases in syntax. This allows for the morphosyntactic structure to be mapped directly to phonology while giving the impression of two contradicting structures. I also explore the Icelandic noun phrase from this perspective. I take the structure of the noun to mirror the structure of the noun phrase and explore the placement of modifiers within the noun phrase and how different orders can be derived. I furthermore explore domains within the noun phrase through ellipsis and extraction. I argue that domains within the noun phrase are determined in the same way as domains within the noun, i.e. contextually, and appear to line up with the noun-internal domain definers.

В современной лингвистике глоссирование является неизбежным атрибутом оформления примеров в научном тексте. Настоящий доклад посвящен рассмотрению проблем, возникающих при глоссировании новогреческих диалектных текстов. Цель доклада — продемонстрировать, что далеко не все проблемы носят технический характер и связаны с оформлением текста, а глоссирование следует считать мощнейшим инструментом для исследования морфонологии и морфосинтаксиса исследуемого языкового материала.

Nowadays glosses have become a very tool for presentation of linguistic examples. In this report I analyze the problems I faced as I supplied Modern Greek dialect texts with glosses. In my opinion these are not just technical problems and glosses should be regarded as a key to morphophonology and morphosyntax

This paper develops a new optimality-theoretic analysis of lexical accent in Hittite (Anatolian, Indo-European). I demonstrate that Hittite synchronic stress assignment is consistent with Kiparsky and Halle's (1977) BASIC ACCENTUATION PRINCIPLE , which assigns primary stress to the leftmost morpheme lexically specified for prosodic prominence or else to the left edge of a prosodic word. The Hittite evidence is thus shown to converge with Kiparsky and Halle's reconstruction of this principle for the common ancestor of the non-Anatolian Indo-European languages (i.e. Proto-Nuclear-Indo-European), and in view of this agreement, argued to be reconstructible for Proto-Indo-European itself.

The present article discusses how the combination of structural (qualitative) and al-gorithmic (quantitative) perspectives provides valuable insights into geolinguistic patterning and variability, and hence testifies to the importance of the integrating approach in addressing geolinguistic complexity. In doing so, it shows how language is constantly modulated in the form of innovations that emerge in structurally layered and causal formations, dictated by a subtle interplay between system-based and system external properties. A case that accounts for this kind of geolinguistic complexity is provided by this data-driven study on Berber (Afro-asiatic), which shows how certain phonological and morphological innovation processes triggered by the vocalisa-tion of the liquids /r/, /ṛ/, /rr/ and /ṛṛ/ in Rif Berber (North, Northeast, and Northwest Morocco) create language variation and change. Furthermore, the Berber data examined demonstrate the significant role of certain system-internal factors, such as economy and code conformity, in the diffusion of new phonetic, phonological, and morphological items. In order to better understand the intricacy of the various vocalisation phenomena addressed in the study, the results of the qualitative analysis (synchrony and diachrony) are also contrasted with the algorithmic results ensuing from computing geolinguistic distances by means of the Levenshtein distance calculating method with phone strings tokenised in pair-wise alignments (pondered variables).

In Old Prussian there is one famous form, namely, poklausīmanas "heard, answered". The reason for its renown is that it is regarded by some to be a present passive participle, and, by the same token, directly continue the Proto-Indo-European medio-passive participle in *-mh1no- as reflected e.g. in Vedic -māna- and Greek -μενο-. However, such a supposition is problematic in a few regards. Firstly, Baltic, like Slavic, knows only present passive participle in -m-, which makes the Old Prussian form, at the very least, enigmatic. Secondly, if OPr. -manas truly reflects the ancestral PIE morpheme, it sheds doubts on the validity of the hitherto reconstructed Proto-Balto-Slavic participial suffix *-ma as reflecting PIE *-mh1no-. In the present paper it is argued that Old Prussian poklausīmanas indeed is a present passive participle and that the suffix -mana- does in fact derive from an earlier *-mna- which, in turn, continues PIE *-mh1no-. As for the shape of the Old Prussian suffix, it is proposed that -mana- contains a secondary anaptyctic vowel as suggested by other evidence. Furthermore, some light is shed on the possibility of reconstructing the Proto-Balto-Slavic participial suffix not as *-ma- but rather as *-mna-, which would be more consistent with the shape of the reconstructed PIE suffix from which it derives.

We discuss theoretical approaches to blocking effects, with particular emphasis on cases in which words appear to block phrases (and perhaps vice versa). These approaches share at least one intuition: that syntactic and semantic features create possible ‘‘cells’ ’ or slots in which particu-lar items can appear, and that blocking occurs when one such cell is occupied by one form as opposed to another. Accounts of blocking differ along two primary dimensions: the size of the objects that com-pete with one another (morphemes, words, phrases, sentences); and whether or not ungrammatical forms are taken into consideration in determining the correct output (relatedly, whether otherwise well-formed objects are marked ungrammatical by competition). We argue that blocking in the sense of competition for the expression of syntactic or semantic features is limited to insertion of the phonological expo-nents of such features (the Vocabulary items of Distributed Morphol-ogy) at terminal nodes fr...