1 Introduction 1.1 Wh-expressions as diagnostics of scope 1.1.1 Fronting and possible answers as indicators of scope 1.1.2 3 Subjacency and wh-in-situ 3.1 The diagnostic of possible answers 3.

This study investigates the relationship between variation due to prosodic prominence and variation due to sound change. We compare two hypotheses: under prominence vowels move in the direction of vowel shift, and under prominence vowels are hyperarticulated, and move to positions more peripheral in the vowel space. These hypotheses make competing predictions for two vowels currently undergoing...

In this paper I discuss the relationship between two sound changes in Gallo-Roman: the fronting of /a/ in stressed open syllables, and the palatalization of /k, g/ before /a/ in addition to /i, e, /. I argue that allophonic Fronting created the original phonetic conditions for Palatalization, but that the phonological structure of the language led to extension of palatalization to non-fronted ...

One of the most important questions surrounding the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) is its chronology: which vowel was the first to move, and how long ago did these movements happen? Based on a large-scale apparenttime study, Labov, Ash and Boberg (2006) posit that /ae/ ‘cat’ shifted first, followed by /o~ah/ ‘cot’. The authors note, however, that this ordering is tenuous. Authors such as Thomas (2...

∗ James N. Collins, Stanford University, [email protected]. Acknowledgements: Thanks to Emily Sataua and Joey Zodiakal for their time as consultants. Data from these two consultants for this project was collected in 2013. Both consultants self-identify as speakers of American Samoa Samoan. Thanks also to Vince Schwenke-Enoka and Rev. Iakopo Leleimalefaga for additional judgements. Thanks to ...

This paper presents an acoustic analysis of the three corner vowels in the Diapix Foreign Language corpus (DIAPIX-FL) which contains material from English and Spanish native speakers from both their L1 and L2. We investigated how L1 vowel characteristics influence the production of L2 vowels, and to what extent a current sound change in one of the languages is reflected in the other. We find th...