To avoid potential miscommunication resulting from structural ambiguity, speakers and listeners often rely on differences in prosodic realization. For instance, the sentence "Jennifer blackmailed the boss of the clerk [who was dishonest"][subscript RC'] is realized with different prosody depending on the attachment of the relative clause…

The prosody of the stanzaic poems called madrasê, written in Syriac by Ephrem of Nisibis in the fourth century, has long been studied by scholars. Until now, these studies have focused on meter, but this has left many questions unanswered. The present study examines the interclausal syntax of individual stanzas of madrasê V and VI of the cycle on…

Experiments were conducted to examine the influence of syntactic boundaries on the operation of a phonological rule in speech production. Results indicate that traditional metrics of boundary strength, as well as linguistic formulations of phonological rules, must be elaborated to recognize the special status of clause boundaries and deletion…

Revised version of a paper delivered at the Second Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, Gainesville, Florida, October 30 - November 1, 1969. (VM)

Examines the differences in the way French and English treat contrastive stress and comparatives, with implications for translation. (AM)

Vowel mutation in Welsh is outlined. A proposal that two classes of compounds exist in Welsh is based on the occurrence of vowel mutation in words and in certain compounds. Evidence from stress patterns and from non-phonological aspects of the grammar support this. An alternative proposal is discussed and rejected. Available from the MIT Press, 28…

This study explores sound-symbolic, or mimetic, words in the Japanese language, the majority of which are never entered in Japanese dictionaries, and which may not be fully understood in all their nuances by native speakers. The extensiveness of the sound-symbolic system is related to the semantic under-differentiation of Japanese verbs. An…

This paper discusses the phonology-syntax interface in Akan, a language spoken in Ghana and the Cote d'Ivoire, describing a medium of exchange between phonology and syntax. Studies in lexical phonology have distinguished two levels in phonology--lexical and post-lexical--based on how and where phonological rules apply, although some phonological…

Although intonation has been said to be one of the first meaningful units of language that a child acquires, it is difficult to say just what this really means. How does the child learn to distinguish the various grammatical meanings that an intonation can have? It was hypothesized that the child first acquires question and request forms on the…

This paper is a report of two studies of the relationship between intonation and syntax. An analysis of intonation was used to decide whether the pivot-like two-morpheme constructions of a one- and one-half-year-old girl were single lexical items or two separate lexical items. Further, the intonation contours connected with her linguistically…

The influence of two aspects of language structure, syntax and associativity, on the free recall of verbal messages was investigated. (Syntax refers to the rules for ordering words within sentences; associativity refers to the network of meaningful relationships which exist among words in a language.) Twenty-four children from each of grades…

This updated and expanded version of a 1991 book provides an account of the development of Spanish over the last 2,000 years. The six chapters include: (1) "Introduction" (e.g., Indo-European, Latin, and Romance); (2) "Phonology" (phonological change, transmission, suprasegmental features, development of the vowel system, development of the…

Proposes an analysis of Spanish stress patterns based on a combination of phonological and morphological surface structure, which draws evidence from psycholinguistic data as well. (Author/AM)

A study investigated the relationship between syntax, discourse, and suprasegmentals in reported utterances (e.g., "He said,..."). The study is intended as both theoretical and descriptive, specifically, proposing a model of intonation in spontaneous oral Quebec French. The first chapter reviews research on Quebec French prosody, on oral…