/S/ Variation as Accommodation

Accommodation can lead to innovated variation

The initiation of sound change requires the emergence of innovated variants. One possible source of innovated variants is non-faithful transference of linguistic features during accommodation to a received speech signal. If the subphonemic cues associated with a phonological contrast are realized differently in an accommodating speaker's speech than in both the speaker's previous speech and in ...

Bridging as Coercive Accommodation

[Van der Sandt, 1992] introduces [Lewis, 1979]’ notion of accommodation in Discourse Representation Theory [Kamp and Reyle, 1993] as a tool to account for gaps in the discourse. His theory of presupposition projection takes presuppositions to behave like anaphora. Anaphoric expressions normally are linked to antecedents that have previously been established in the discourse. If example (1) woul...

Presupposition Accommodation as Exception Handling

Van der Sandt’s algorithm for handling presupposition is based on a “presupposition as anaphora” paradigm and is expressed in the realm of Kamp’s DRT. In recent years, we have proposed a typetheoretic rebuilding of DRT that allows Montague’s semantics to be combined with discourse dynamics. Here we explore van der Sandt’s theory along the line of this formal framework. It then results that pres...

Dialectal variation of Italian s-voicing as constraint interaction

Many Italian dialects, such as Lombardian for instance, display intervocalic voicing of the fricative s. In some very restricted environments, intervocalic s-voicing does not apply. When prefixes ending in a vowel are attached to roots starting with an s, this s surfaces as voiceless (a-[s]ociale 'asocial'). However, the final s of prefixes, such as dis-, surfaces as voiced in combination with ...

Variation of the Stiles-Crawford Effect with Accommodation and Myopia