I argue in this paper that vowel length plays no role in the synchronic phonology of Tigrinya: processes affecting vowels should be treated in featural terms only. The evidence in favor of synchronic vowel length is weak, and stronger evidence favors an analysis in which vowel length is phonologically irrelevant. While some researchers have made use of synchronic vowel length to account for ost...

The problem of auxiliary fronting in complex polar questions occupies a prominent position within the nature versus nurture controversy in language acquisition. We employ a model of statistical learning which uses sequential and semantic information to produce utterances from a bag of words. This linear learner is capable of generating grammatical questions without exposure to these structures ...

Incomplete category fronting in German has been argued to involve movement of a constituent containing a trace (Thiersch 1985; Webelhuth and den Besten 1987; G. Müller 1996). In this paper, we show that the two kinds of examples used as key evidence for such remnant movement, partial-VP and “partial-NP” topicalization, do not motivate an unbounded dependency theory complex enough to license fro...

A long-standing discussion in Dutch syntax concerns the question whether pp dependents of a noun may be fronted. Although examples which apparently illustrate this pattern can be easily found, it is difficult to come up with linguistic arguments which show once and for all that the fronted pp is actually a dependent of a noun, and not of a verb. In this paper, we investigate to what extent corp...

We present data on the pronunciation of oral and nasal vowels in northern and southern French varieties. In particular a sharp contrast exists in the fronting of the open /O/ towards [œ] in the North and the denasalisation of nasal vowels in the South. We examine how linguistic changes in progress may affect these vowels, which are governed by the left/right context and bring to light differenc...

The production of /l/ is examined for preand post-operative patients who have undergone surgery in three distinct areas (anterior, posterior or lateral tongue) followed by radiotherapy and reconstruction. Results show F1 and F2 to be raised after surgery in all cases. Normalised measures of tongue height (F1-F0) and extension (F2-F1) revealed no significant change after surgery to the side of t...

This study is concerned with sound change over time in Australian English. The aim was to determine via acoustic analysis whether there is evidence of /u/-fronting in a speaker population of elderly and middle-aged male newsreaders. Results showed that the middle-aged group was producing /u/ further towards the front of the vowel space than the elderly group in their original recording, and tha...

This paper describes technical and methodological advances in the development of a procedure for measuring changes in accuracy and stability of linguapalatal (tongue-palate) contact patterns during a course of visual feedback therapy using electropalatography (EPG). The procedure is exemplified by a case in which therapy was aimed at resolving a pattern of velar fronting whereby phonetic target...