Enclisis/Proclisis Alternations in Romance: Allomorphies and (Re)Ordering

Analysis of Romance in Beighami\'s Darabnameh

For centuries, storytellers and scops recited epics and national, tribal, historical, and religious stories for people, through musical speeches. Some of these narrators wrote down what they recited, and some others dictated them for scribes to be recorded. Some kings and lords also had scops in their courts to recite the stories to scribes. One of the old, oral stories of Persian literature th...

Verb Classes and Alternations

In this report, we investigate the relationship between the semantic and syntactic properties of verbs. Our work is based on the English Verb Classes and Alternations of (Levin, 1993). We explore how these classes are manifested in other languages, in particular, in Bangla, German, and Korean. Our report includes a survey and classiication of several hundred verbs from these languages into the ...

Melodic alternations in Spanish

This article describes how the tonal elements of two common Spanish intonation contours –the falling statement and the low-rising-falling request– align with the segmental string in broad-focus utterances differing in number of prosodic words. Using an imitation-and-completion task, we show that (i) the last stressed syllable of the utterance, traditionally viewed as carrying the ‘nuclear’ acce...

Phonetics and Phonology in Gallo-romance Palatalisation

Palatalisation of the velars ⁄k, g ⁄ in Gallo-Romance applied not just before the usual front vowels ⁄ i, e, e ⁄ but also, famously, before the low vowel ⁄a ⁄ . Various scenarios have been proposed regarding the phonetic realisation of ⁄a ⁄ and its relation to palatalisation. I argue that ⁄a ⁄ was allophonically fronted to [æ] in stressed open syllables, where the vowel eventually merged with ⁄...

Intonation in Romance: Systemic similarities and differences