While examples have been clearly attested in the literature, reversal of a merger is an uncommon occurrence that apparently contradicts principles underlying sound change. Understanding implications therefore requires understanding their implementation: whether there was full first place, what phonetic path taken to separate was, and social motivation behind reversal. I take this approach case ...

While multiethnolects have been documented in major European metropolises over the last several decades, no such varieties reported North America. This is surprising given high degree of global immigration many American cities. We consider Toronto, Ontario, one most multicultural cities world, and explore features a Multicultural Toronto English. Data comes from young people an ethnolinguistica...

the changing of round and back vowel /u/ to unround and front vowel [i] occurs in lori dialects as well as some other persian dialects. this vowel change includes both unrounding and fronting. this paper aimed at coming up with an inclusive ranking of constraints to explain occurrence and nonoccurrence of this vowel change in various phonological environments in silahkori dialect within optimal...

in order to simplify the pronunciation ofthe adult's words,children use phonological processes inthe initial years oftheir speech growth.the present study aims at considering phonological processes ina group oftwo tofour-year old farsi speaking children.the results indicate that itisnot possible to correctly and precisely account forthe occurrences ofsuch processes in children’s pronunciat...

Cross-linguistically, there are two devices for grammar to process the focus mark [+FocusJ: the fronting of focused constituents and the insertion of a Focus Mark such as the English 'be' before focused constituents. In this mode of formulation, a comparative study of Focus and Focus-Marking in Chinese and Malay has been conducted. These two languages are similar and different. They are similar...

Temporal patterns in human movement, and in speech in particular, occur on multiple timescales. Regularities in such patterns have been observed between speech gestures, which are relatively quick movements of articulators (e.g., tongue fronting and lip protrusion), and also between rhythmic units (e.g., syllables and metrical feet), which occur more slowly. Previous work has shown that pattern...