Standard Austrian German, which distinguishes eight front vowels, exploits two front constriction locations for distinguishing these vowels, a pre-palatal and a palatal one. However, the pre-palatal location is acoustically unstable, and, consequently, phonologically undesirable. The existence of a sound change which neutralizes the /i/ and /ɪ/ vowels in a first step and shifts the constriction...

Recent years have seen considerable debate concerning Russian feminitives, i.e. derived formations that designate female professionals, such as advokatka, advokatša, advokatessa, ženščina-advokat or advokat-ženščina all refer to lawyers. In this article, we investigate the use of feminitives based on data from Araneum Russicum Maximum corpus and National Corpus. It is shown choice feminitive so...

Verb-Noun compounds in English can be classified into endocentric compounds and exocentric ones. Among exocentric Verb-Noun compounds, two types of constructions are very common: ‘Verb + Object = Agent’ construction and ‘Verb + Object =Instrument’ construction. Based on the cognitive analysis of endocentric V+N compounds, this paper argues that exocentric V+N compounds can be analyzed in the sa...

Spectral contrast effects, the perceptual magnification of spectral differences between sounds, have been widely shown to influence speech categorization. However, whether talker information alters spectral contrast effects was recently debated [Laing, Liu, Lotto, and Holt, Front. Psychol. 3, 1-9 (2012)]. Here, contributions of reliable spectral properties, between-talker and within-talker vari...

In this paper we give an analysis of Murrinh-Patha verbs as morphological complex predicates. We argue that the different parts of the complex predicate provide information for different layers of the argument structure; more precisely, that classifier stems determine the number of arguments a verbal complex takes while lexical stems contribute thematic information. We further show how the argu...

This paper investigates novel evidence from Russian Verb-Stranding Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VVPE), and argues for its use as a probe into the syntactic structure of morphophonologically inseparable but morphosyntactically complex verbs. The first step is to distinguish internal argument drop from VVPE, because they appear identical on the surface. I present novel evidence that Russian internal arg...

this study compares and contrasts tense and inherent aspect in english and persian lan-guage from a semantic and syntactic point of view. the aspectual verb system in both english and persian are semantically interpreted alike. however, in persian a group of stative verbs are grammaticalized by the imperfective obligatory morpheme mi-, while in english all sta-tive verbs perfective. furthermore...

The acquisition of argument structures has been studied by a variety of second language acquisition scholars within the past two decades (Atay, 2010; Can, 2009; Chay, 2006, & Kras, 2007, among others). In the present study, ‘Predicate’ as the most substantial element of a sentence is investigated. There are three English verb-types which seem to be more problematic for Persian EFL learners: (a)...