This paper examines two current sound changes in Canadian English (CE): the Canadian Shift (CS) and the fronting of back-upgliding vowels. Among the changes involved in the CS is the retraction of the TRAP vowel from its initial position in the low-front quadrant of the vowel space to a new position in the low-central region. Among the changes affecting the back-upgliding vowels is a forward sh...

The debate between hierarchical versus sequential structure in language acquisition has recently flared up again (cf. Frank, Bod & Christiansen 2012; Pesetsky 2013). Roughly, the nativist view on language endorses that human language acquisition is guided by innate rules that operate on hierarchical structures. The empiricist view assumes that language acquisition is the product of abstractions...

This paper presents a reevaluation of the choice between the two analyses for German partial fronting phenomena proposed in the literature, remnant movement and reanalysis. We show that the empirical arguments which were presented in favor of an extraction analysis are not convincing, and we provide empirical evidence supporting a reanalysis-like approach. Turning to a detailed data discussion,...

Thanks are due to the Institute of the Czech National Corpus and to the Institute of Computer Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences which kindly provided the data source for this paper. I also wish to thank Denisa Lenertová and the audiences of the Potsdam Workshop on Heterogenity in Linguistic Databases and of the 13th JungslavistInnen-Treffen for discussion, and the editors for their frie...

This study reports on the acoustic properties of the front vowel /i/ and the fronted back vowel /u/ in Standard Southern British English (SSBE). These two vowels are realized with very similar (and for some tokens overlapping) values of F2, so that F2 does not seem to be a reliable acoustic cue for the distinction between the two vowels. To test further possible cues to the English front-back c...

This paper is concerned with explaining how historical sound change can emerge as a consequence of the association between continuous, dynamic speech signals and phonological categories. The relevance of this research to developing socially believable speech processing machines is that sound change is both cognitive and social and also because it provides a unique insight into how the categorie...

Purpose This study has two key aims: first, to provide developmental articulatory norms for the alveolar–velar distinction in 30 English-speaking typically developing (TD) children; second, illustrate utility of reported measures classifying and quantifying speech children with a history persistent velar fronting as they develop contrast longitudinally. Method involved secondary data analysis U...

The current study aimed to explore the phenomenon of preposing in English and Arabic languages, identify its main salient characteristics functions. It also attempted address most frequent translation problems associated with this propose solutions such based on sound scientific theoretical grounds. Preposing refers advancing a sentence constituent initial position for rhetorical or structural ...

Given this state of affairs, two question immediately arise: what exactly are the positions to which Wh-phrases are moving and what the driving force behind this movement is. Rudin (1988) argues that the Wh-phrase which is the first in the linear order moves to SpecCP, while others are adjoined to IP. The movement of the first Wh-phrase can be taken to be an instance of familiar Wh-movement to ...