The present study aims to address the question of how vowel quality varies between rural and town-dwelling male speakers of Irish-English in South Roscommon, Ireland. Previous studies have identified four distinct varieties of Irish-English in Ireland: the Eastern, South &Western, Midland, and Northern varieties, loosely based on the political provinces of Munster, Connaught, Leinster, and Ulster. County Roscommon straddles the provinces of Connaught and Leinster, complicating the presence of phonological features associated with one of two different ‘accent regions’. The last phonological study carried out in Roscommon was by Patrick Leo Henry in 1957. While this was a promising start in assessing regional distinctions, rural ones in particular, the lack of recent studies leaves a sizeable gap that does not address modern changes in the linguistic landscape of Ireland, nor the availability of modern methods of acoustic analysis. In particular, the present study investigates the pre-nasal merging of front unrounded vowels /ɛ/ and /ɪ/, vowel centralization, and a lower /æ/, associated with the Western variety of Irish English. Factors such as supraregionalization lead to my hypothesis that rural speakers will demonstrate higher frequency of the vowel features associated with the Western variety. To assess the frequency of certain vowel sounds, twenty participants were recorded and formant data was extracted for F1 and F2 values of the tokens. It was found that the rural speakers in Roscommon demonstrated a more prominent merger between /ɛ/ and /ɪ/, a lower [æ], and the rural speakers demonstrated an overall trend toward centralization.

The Proto-Indo-European causative/iterative suffix *-ei̯e- was inherited by Old Iranian and persists in almost all Middle and Modern Iranian languages as -aya- and -ēn- (-Vn-) respectively. Comparably, in the Indic branch -aya- functions as a causative suffix in Sanskrit beside another suffix -āpaya which became the productive causative suffix -āvē- in Middle Indic and still used in Modern Indic today. Evidence shows eight Eastern Iranian languages- †Khotanese, †Khwarazmian, Parachi, Wakhi, Munji, Pashto, Ormuri, and Yidgha- using the morphological causative suffix in addition to the expected Iranian one -aya- or -Vn-. This alternative causative suffix is reconstructible as *-au̯ai̯a- and its attested reflexes have the forms -VwV-, -Vv-, and -wV-. Moreover, in two dialects of the Northwestern Iranian language Gilaki, Dakhili and Langaroudi, the causative suffix is not -Vn- but is rather -be(ː)- in the present tense. In this study I examine the synchronic function of the Gilaki causative suffix -be(ː)- as well as its diachronic origins. I show that Gilaki -be(ː)- primarily functions as a causative suffix and that it is a form which cannot be explained as an innovation within Gilaki itself through phonological or analogical change. As a matter of fact, I demonstrate that this suffix is better explained as deriving from PIr.*-au̯ai̯a- and is connected to the aforementioned Eastern Iranian suffixes. I also argue the reason for realization of /p/ and */u̯/ in -āpaya and *-au̯ai̯a- is phonological and probably goes back to some stages of PIIr.

This thesis examines the variety of English spoken in East Dorm at Harvey Mudd College. It describes aspects of the syntax and phonology of Eastspeak, focusing in particular on how Eastspeak has been influenced by the language of the internet. This includes tendencies toward brevity and language play, as well as the use of specific constructions used on the internet, and playful pronunciations that are influenced by creative misspellings used online. Specific Eastspeak phenomena discussed include conversion, deletion, and unusual determiner and quantifier use.

This thesis investigates native speaker attitudes towards English loanwords in Japanese and the ways in which these loanwords are used. The imperialism and hegemony of English can often cause anger or worry for the preservation of the cultural identity of the borrowing language. However, the results from a 9-page sociolinguistic questionnaire suggest that English loanwords are overwhelmingly seen as useful and necessary and are generally associated with positive attitudes. Additionally, many native Japanese speakers feel that loanwords provide more options for expression, both functionally and as a possible pragmatic tool for performing Japaneseness. On the other hand, overuse of loanwords—especially less common ones—can also exemplify the power imbalance between Japanese and the powerful and hegemonic English. The study also revealed how powerful the Japanese linguistic systems are at assimilating English into the Japanese language. With established and institutionally supported phonological and orthographic conventions in place, foreign-derived vocabulary can easily become nativized, assimilated, and considered to be Japanese in the minds of speakers.

In this thesis, I investigate a decades-old problem found in the stop system of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). More specifically, I will be investigating the paucity of */b/ in the forms reconstructed for the ancient, hypothetical language. As cross-linguistic evidence and phonological theory alone have fallen short of providing a satisfactory answer, herein will I employ modern empirical methods of linguistic investigation, namely laboratory phonology experiments and computational database analysis. Following Byrd 2015, I advocate for an examination of synchronic phenomena and behavior as a method for investigating diachronic change. In Chapter 1, I present an overview of the various proposed phonological systems of PIE and some of the explanations previously given for the enigmatic rarity of PIE */b/. Chapter 2 presents a detailed account of three lab phonology experiments I conducted in order to investigate perceptual confusability as a motivator of asymmetric merger within a system of stop consonants. Chapter 3 presents the preliminary form and findings of a computational database of reconstructed forms in PIE that I created and have named the Database of Etymological Reconstructions Beginnning in Proto-Indo-European (DERBiPIE). The final chapter, Chapter 4, offers a summary of the work presented herein and conclusions that may be drawn, offering suggestions for continued work on the topic and others like it.

The study of kana 仮名 development has only begun in the last fifteen years, with much scholarship focused upon discerning either the Heian origins of kana or such later developments as furigana 振り仮名 (phonetic guides) and spelling rules. However, these perspectives have largely overlooked a key moment in Japanese writing history: in 1900, the Meiji government standardized the kana, from hundreds of possible variant graphemes to the forty-six used today, one symbol per sound. From then on, what had commonly been known only as kana were divided into two groups: hiragana 平仮名, the standard set, and hentaigana 変体仮名, the set of all non-standard graphemes. This standardization represented a seismic shift in Japanese writing culture, affecting everything from education to aesthetics, and yet it occurred without any bureaucratic debate—or, it seems, any post-legislation public outcry. This study addresses the apparent incongruity by examining a variety of primary sources for evidence of a pre-Meiji acceptance of a standardized set of graphemes, before the official standardization in 1900. Arguing from this evidence, a convincing case is made that the kana made standard in 1900 had been historically recognized as distinct from all other variants, despite there being no demonstrable difference in their use in context. This project, by closely examining long-neglected sources, sheds new light on the issue of pre-modern Japanese script usage.

This thesis studies the inter-group variation of the consonant endings among five principal subgroups of the Chaoshan dialect, a branch of the South Min dialect in Eastern Guangdong Province, from the perspective of language contact and horizontal transmission. I conduct a quantitative study to present the synchronic variance of the consonant endings among five Chaoshan subgroups and the diachronic variance from Middle Chinese to modern Chaoshan dialect on a numerical scale. The current literature tends to take the change of the consonant endings as a process of weakening governed by regular rules. My research findings challenge this conventional view. First, the change of the consonant endings from Middle Chinese to five subgroups of modern Chaoshan dialect is irregular, which is an exception to the linguistic laws proposed in the existing literature. Secondly, I find that some characters without consonant endings or with a weakened ending in Chaozhou in the 19th century reverse to have a consonant ending in modern Chaoshan dialect. This reversal contradicts to the weakening hypothesis that regards the change of the consonant endings as a process of simplifying. Finally, my quantitative research shows that Chaozhou dialect in the 19th century in much closer to modern Xiamen dialect than to five subgroups of modern Chaoshan dialect in terms of the relativeness in consonant endings, which is the opposite to the prediction that languages become more and more different and have no consequent contact with other daughter languages after separating from the proto-language. We propose that the actual situation of the consonant endings in different subgroups of the Chaoshan dialect can be better explained from the perspective of language contact and horizontal transmission. The interaction between Han Chinese and non-Han Chinese is the primary reason for the change of the consonant endings of the Chaoshan dialect. Also, the language contact between Chaoshan aborigines and migrants from the Fujian Province leads to the divergence of the consonant endings in different Chaoshan subgroups.Population structure and other social factors determine what phonetic features survive after several times of horizontal transmission.

The hP’ags-pa script was created in the late 13th century (the early Yuan dynasty) which was intended to transliterate all the languages of the Mongol empire such as Tibetan, Uyghur and Chinese into a single writing system. Among all the Chinese hP’ags-pa materials, the primer Bǎijiā xìng 百家姓 [Surnames of the Hundred Families] (BJX) offered us extensive hP’ags-pa syllables and their corresponding Chinese characters. The BJX in hP’ags-pa script has four editions that are currently known to scholars. A careful comparison and examination of the four editions of the BJX text reveals three main types of errors in hP’ags-pa syllables: (1) The misuse of similar-looking letters; (2) Pure clerical errors; and (3) Errors in the transliteration of variant pronunciations. The variant transliterations in the C edition provide some clues to sound changes, including (1) The devoicing of voiced stops and fricatives and (2) The loss of the bilabial nasal coda [m]. Aside from the variant transliterations, the majority of errors are purely graphic and reflect a lack of knowledge about the writing system. An examination of the use of the hP’ags-pa script in the BJX text suggests several potential reasons for the failure of the script to come into common use. These include: (1) A misconception of the nature of the hP’ags-pa writing system; (2) An ineffective learning approach; (3) The discrepancy of phonological categories and phonetic values; and (4) The non-adaptability to the Chinese language.

Pronominal complex predicates in colloquial Persian are periphrastic constructions with an idiosyncratic syntactic pattern. They show a peculiar behavior compared to the regular agreement system in Persian, and they are the only construction in Persian which requires the obligatory presence of a pronominal enclitic. This work is an attempt to analyze this construction in order to find its function. For this purpose, a lexical semantic classification of them was proposed, which helped in presenting a new analysis. It was found out that this construction is used to express a particular diathesis in which the topic of the sentence (determined according to Givón’s topicality hierarchy) is an indirect participant. I proposed a hybrid dual-layer agreement system which includes a morphosyntactic and a semantic layer. The pronominal enclitic was analyzed as a phrasal affix and agreement marker by reference to Givón’s (1976) and Anderson’s (2005) arguments. The construction was analyzed to be an instance of the external possessor construction proposed by Haig (2008), which is observed in Iranian languages. The classification of the data clarified the mapping of semantics onto syntax. The proposed analysis could be added to and unified with the current analysis of Persian complex predicates (Bonami and Samvelian, 2009).

Among Urdu’s many verb+verb constructions, this thesis focuses on those constructions, which combine the stem of a main content verb with another inflected verb which is used in a semantically bleached sense. Prior work on these constructions has been focused on their structural make-up and syntactic behavior in various environments. While there is consensus among scholars (Butt 1995, Hook 1977, Carnikova 1989, Porizka 2000 et al.) that these stem+verb constructions encode aspectual information, to date no clear theory has been put forward to explain the nature of their aspectual contribution. In short, we do not have a clear idea why these constructions are used instead of simple verbs. This work is an attempt to understand the precise function of these constructions. I propose that simple verbs (henceforth SV) in Urdu deal only with the action of the verb whereas (regardless of the semantic information contributed by the second inflected verb,1) the stem+verb constructions essentially deal with the action of the verb as well as the state of affairs resulting from this action. The event represented by these constructions is essentially a telic event as defined by Comrie (1976), whose resultant state is highlighted from the use of these constructions. The attention of the listener is then shifted to the result of this telic event, whose salience in the discourse is responsible for various interpretations of the event; hence my term ‘resultive construction’ (henceforth RC). When these constructions are made using the four special verbs (rah ‘stay’, sak ‘can’, paa ‘manage’ and cuk ‘finish’), the product is not resultive. Each of these verbs behaves differently and is somewhere between a resultive and an auxiliary verb construction. This work can be extended to other verb-verb construction in Urdu and other related and non-related languages as well. The analysis of the precise function of the RCs can also help in developing a model for them in various functional grammars. The proposed properties of RCs can be utilized in the semantic analysis of the Urdu quantifiers. This work should aid in identification and explanation of constructions in other languages, particularly those that are non-negatable under normal contexts. [1] All second inflected verbs with the exception of four special verbs rah ‘stay’, sak ‘can’, paa ‘manage’ and cuk ‘finish’. These four special verbs are either auxiliaries or modals as identified in prior literature.