Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 32-09, Section: A, page: 5212. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1971.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 32-09, Section: A, page: 5214. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1971.

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This dissertation is a grammar of Rena (ISO bez), a Bantu language spoken in southwestern Tanzania by approximately 600,000 people. Bena is largely undocumented, and though aspects of Bena grammar have been described, there is no usable, detailed treatment of the Bena language. Therefore the goal of this dissertation is provide the first detailed description of Bena that discusses phonology, morphology, and syntax. The analysis described in this grammar is based on data collected in the Njombe district of Tanzania during 2008 and 2009. Data throughout the grammar is taken from both elicitation and a corpus of 23 narratives. / Though Bena is spoken by over half a million people, it is threatened by Swahili (the national language of Tanzania). Swahili's prominence in Tanzania has increased drastically since independence in 1961, and many (if not most) of the approximately 120 languages spoken in Tanzania are threatened by Swahili. Bena is no exception to this. The results of a sociolinguistic survey conducted in 2009 indicate that Swahili is having a significant impact on the Bena language. Therefore the writing of this dissertation comes at a crucial time. It provides a record of Bena at a time before too many features of the language are lost due to language contact. / The first chapter provides an introduction to the Bena language and people. It also discusses results from the 2009 sociolinguistic survey which had the goal of clarifying questions on both the dialectal situation and the sociolinguistic vitality of Bena. The second chapter is devoted to phonetics and phonology. Of particular interest in this chapter are Bena's "predictable" tone system and the morphophonological process of imbrication (a type of coalescence in which multiple morphemes are interwoven together). The third chapter gives an overview of Bena word classes and provides a road map of the next several chapters of the grammar. Fourth is a description of Bena nominal morphology and other elements in the noun phrase. Like other Bantu languages, Bena uses a complex noun class system; Bena's 19 noun classes and the ways in which they are used are discussed in detail in this chapter. / Following this is a description of Bena verbal morphology. Of particular interest in Bena is its tense aspect system---Bena distinguishes four separate past tenses and three distinct futures; these interact with five aspects. The second major focus of Chapter 5 is the use of a series of suffixes in verbal derivation. The sixth chapter of the grammar describes adverbs and other invariable words in Bena. Chapter 7 describes major aspects of Bena syntax. Because Bantu languages have rich morphological systems, most grammars of Bantu languages either give a fairly cursory treatment of syntax or they ignore it completely. This dissertation aims to fill that gap by providing a description of a Bantu language that is more balanced and acknowledges the significant roles played by both morphology and syntax. The final chapter highlights several features of Bena from a typological perspective and discusses areas in which further research on Bena has the potential to contribute significantly to Bantu linguistics.

This dissertation offers a novel account of the syntax of sentence adverbs. The need for a new account is clear from the lack of descriptive coverage and theoretical coherence in current work on adverbial syntax. Descriptively, the majority of work has so far neglected the fact that sentence adverbs behave syntactically like typical focusing adverbs. There has been no coherent and let alone comprehensive syntactic analysis of various focus-sensitive adverbs in generative grammar. / The main proposal I make is that sentence adverbs, as well as focusing adverbs in general, are 'inflectional affixes writ large'. In other words, sentence adverbs are derived in the same way as inflectional affixes are derived in syntax. In the current Minimalist framework (Chomsky 2000 et seq. ), this parallelism implies that both involve the Agree operation. More specifically, I propose that sentence adverbs merge with a verbal or a nominal expression as a result of (i) Match between valued interpretable Mood features (the probe) on C0 and unvalued uninterpretable Mood features (the goal) on a lower functional or lexical head, and (ii) Valuation, where the valued interpretable Mood feature assigns a value to the goal. In order to realize the Valuation, sentence adverbs merge with the lower head that is the locus of the goal, or with the projection of the head, as a result of pied-piping, to some extent similar to the way inflectional affixes are spelled out as affixes in order to realize feature valuation (Chomsky 2001 et seq ). This merge operation is 'delayed- Merge', since this kind of merge applies after regular set-Merge that involves the head containing the goal. / Support for this analysis comes from three sources. First, there is extensive evidence that sentence adverbs behave like C0 elements, although their surface syntactic positions are usually lower. This suggests some kind of syntactic dependency between C0 and lower functional or lexical heads. These preliminary but fundamental facts are discussed in chapter 2. Second, in-depth scrutiny of focus-sensitivity based on the notion of alternatives, and the role focus plays in the syntactic positions of sentence adverbs, provide compelling evidence that sentence adverbs are focus-sensitive adverbs. This property, as discussed in chapter 3, is crucial in determining which constituent enters a syntactic dependency relationship with the C0. Third, based on the Chomsky's (2001 et seq.) current developments of the generative grammar, inflectional affixes are derived by the Agree operation, which include Match, Valuation, and realization of the Valuation. Our treatment of sentence adverbs as 'inflectional affixes writ large' is not only compatible with the theory, but also provides further support for it. These issues are discussed in chapter 4. / The major consequence of this work is to have shown that the theory of sentence adverbs and focusing adverbs is closely connected with the architecture of grammar in general, including the syntax-morphology interface, the syntax-semantics interface, and the Agree operation. There should be much to be gained if we seriously explore the consequences of our findings for the syntax of various other expressions not currently considered to form a natural class with sentence adverbs and focusing adverbs, such as inflectional affixes and clitics.

When discussing focus particles, it has been common practice to rely on the dichotomy of inclusive vs. exclusive particles, a la Konig (1991). Inclusive focus particles are often further divided into scalar particles, such as also, too, and either, and non-scalar particles, such as even. In this thesis, I advance a comparative analysis of the major inclusive focus particles in English, which reveals more complicated pictures of the particles concerned. I show that also and even share far fewer properties than previously assumed. It turns out that also is additive, anaphoric, and anti-scalar, while even is non-additive, non-anaphoric, and scalar. This finding suggests that the traditional classification of focus particles need to be reconsidered, through more in-depth investigation into the semantics of individual particles. In addition, the realization of the disparity of the two English particles leads one to cast doubt on the widely accepted view that Korean focus particle -to is ambiguous between the readings of also and even. Using the same criterion as with the English particles, I provide a univocal approach characterizing -to as additive, not anaphoric, and underspecified with respect to scalarity. Another finding in this descriptive study is that other than being focus particles, also, even and -to shares one important role: they impose meta-propositional constraint on the propositions involved. I posit the Parity Condition and the Co-Support Condition for also, and the Non-Entailment Condition and the Co-Argumentation Condition for -to. As for even, I argue, in the footsteps of Kay and Ducrot & Anscombre, that its scalar implicatum is a meta-propositional operator relating the proposition expressed by the sentence containing the particle and a non-monotonous inference supported by this proposition. Finally, I discuss the information status of the three particles, and conclude, against the presupposition approaches, that the existential implicata conveyed by also and -to contributes to the assertorical content of the sentence containing them, and maintain the traditional view, a la Grice, that the scalar implicatum invoked by even is a conventional implicature.

This thesis proposes that there is a form of scrambling in Ukrainian that involves pervasive phonological movement as presented by Agbayani and Golston (2010a) for Classical Greek hyperbaton and applied to analyze scrambling in colloquial Russian by Henderer (2009). The evidence for phonological movement in Ukrainian includes (i) insensitivity of movement to syntactic constraints and semantic conditions that rely on syntactic relations, and (ii) sensitivity to phonology, including phonological constituency and prosodic constraints. This thesis proposes that this form of scrambling in Ukrainian is purely phonological in nature and involves movement of prosodic words (Split Scrambling) and phonological phrases (XP-Scrambling) rather than syntactic constituents.

A spatial expression is defined as a natural language phrase which specifies a position, area or direction of objects, employing any of various parts of speech such as prepositions (on, in, ...), nouns ( front, rear, ...), verbs (locate, stand, ...), adjectives (close, distant, ...), adverbs ( back, next, ...), or even pronouns (here, there). In English, expressions containing prepositional phrases representing spatial relations such as inclusion, contact, or contiguity are prime examples of spatial expressions. / The meaning expressed by a spatial preposition indicates how its arguments physically relate to each other in space. Consider the following examples. a. We saw a boat on the lake. b. John has a cabin on the lake. The locations assigned by the spatial preposition on as in (a) and (b) are a surface and a side of the reference objects, respectively. The first example, (a), gives us an image that a boat is floating on the lake, but (b) causes us to imagine that a cabin is near the edge of the lake. The same prepositional phrase can be used to represent different locations in these examples. / How can the same preposition represent different spatial configurations? Is it a case of ambiguity, or of generality of meaning? What kinds of relationships are expressed via a spatial preposition? What semantic features can we draw from the meanings of the spatial prepositions? How can we decide which semantic features are necessary to specify spatial arrangements? And what kinds of semantic features should we employ in order to disambiguate expressions containing spatial prepositions? / My work is concerned with the semantic study of spatial expressions and their component spatial prepositions, especially (1) the problem of identifying what kinds of spatial relationships are represented via a spatial preposition, (2) the issue of distinguishing various spatial configurations represented by the same spatial preposition, and (3) the issue of interpreting spatial expressions containing spatial prepositions. My study also proposes a semantic model that distinguishes the various spatial relationships and configurations. / The proposed semantic representation model is situated within the framework of Componential Analysis (Katz 1972; Bennett 1975; Wierzbicka 1996; and Jackendoff 1983, 1990) and the Generative Lexicon Theory (Pustejovsky 1991, 1995). To describe the meanings of spatial expressions containing prepositions and to study the spatial relationships between the Figure objects and the Ground objects, the semantic representation model I provide is based on the following: the concept and usage of features from Componential Analysis as well as the argument structure, the qualia structure and co-composition from the Generative Lexicon Theory. / I expect that my proposed semantic representations can distinguish between the various meanings of the spatial prepositions. These representations enable us to disambiguate the spatial prepositions and their configurations by articulating the senses of prepositions on the bases of the various contexts in which the prepositions occur.

In this dissertation I investigated, by using coarticulatory /u/-fronting in the alveolar context for a case study, how native speakers of American English produce coarticulatory variations and how they perceive and reproduce continuously varying speech sounds that are heard in coarticulatory and non-coarticulatory contexts. / The production study addressed the question of whether in American English coarticulatory fronting of /u/ in alveolar contexts is an inevitable consequence of production constraints or if it is produced by active speaker control. The study found that: (1) the relative acoustic difference between the fronted /u/ and the non-fronted /u/ remained across an elicited range of vowel duration; and (2) the degree of acoustic variability was less for the fronted /u/ than the non-fronted /u/. These results indicate that speakers of American English have a distinct and more narrowly specified articulatory target for the fronted /u/ in the alveolar context than for the non-fronted /u/. / The perception study addressed the issue of individual variation and compensation for coarticulation. The study found within-subject consistency in classification of /CVC/ stimuli both in compensatory and non-compensatory contexts. The study found no evidence for a within-subject perception-production link, but did find positive evidence for the relationship between linguistic experience and speech perception---the similarity between the distributional characteristics of the fronted and the non-fronted variants of /u/ in production data (a proxy for ambient language data) and the ranges of variation in perceptual responses toward /CVC/ stimuli in the fronting and the non-fronting contexts. Together, these results suggest that the source of individual variation in speech perception is the differences in the phonological grammar (perceptual category boundary) that guide speech perception, and that this perception grammar emerges in response to the ambient language data. / Finally, the vowel repetition study examined how perceptual compensation for coarticulation and individual differences in speech perception affect vowel repetition performance. This study found that: (1) ambiguous vowels were repeated with a significantly lower F2 when the vowels were heard in the fronting context than in the non-fronting context; (2) a given stimulus was repeated by some listeners un-ambiguously as the vowel belonging to the speaker's /i/ category for all trials, yet the same stimulus was repeated by other listeners un-ambiguously as vowels belonging to that speaker's /u/ category for all trials; and (3) the perceptual category boundary was a significant predictor for the repeated vowel's F2 value. Based on these results, it was hypothesized that one source of pronunciation variation in a given community is individual variation in speech perception that contributes variable mental representations across listeners when they encounter ambiguous speech. / One general pattern that was found in all experiments was vowel-specific variability: responses to /i/ were less variable than responses to /u/ in a production task, and /i/-like stimuli were repeated less variably than /u/-like stimuli in a vowel repetition task. Similarly, between /u/ in fronting and non-fronting contexts, /u/ elicited less variability in the fronting context than in the non-fronting context consistently in the production, perception, and vowel repetition tasks. More broadly, I contend that speech forms a dynamic system, characterized by mutual dependency and multiple causal loops between and among speech perception, speech production, knowledge about pronunciation norm, and ambient language data. These properties in language use govern the output of communicative interactions among members in a speech community, and one such output is member's knowledge of multiple sub-phonemic pronunciation categories that exist in any speech community. Additionally, I argue that any speech community is in a constant state of readiness to respond to an innovative pronunciation as a new community norm, because members have a variable but rich pronunciation repertoire even when there is no observable community-level sound change.

This study analyzes the grammar of Shupamem, a language that belongs to a geographically defined group of languages known as `Grassfields Bantu languages'. Through a comprehensive description of empirical data on essential aspects of the morphosyntax syntax of Shupamem, this dissertation makes significant empirical and theoretical contributions to the increasingly important literature on Grassfields Bantu linguistics. Prominent aspects of Shupamem morphosyntax are discussed with some reference to other closely related Grassfields Bantu languages. The methodology and analytical approach adopted here are essentially in line with the Minimalist Program developed in studies like Chomsky (1995, 2001) and Kayne's (1994) LCA-based approach designed to account for the principles of Universal Grammar. The topics addressed here suggest a great diversity in terms of word order phenomena and morphological markers. The analysis proposed in this study provides some evidence that a number of movement operations attested in Shupamem are highly constrained. / This thesis explicitly centers on: (a) the internal syntax of the DP and word alternation between the head noun and its various modifiers; (b) the syntax of negation that reveals that Shupamem has bipartite negation (Bell 2004) with a great diversity of negation patterns whose surface forms depend on the status of Tense, Aspect and Mood; (c) the syntax of focus that suggests two focus fields for Shupamem e.g., a left peripheral field and a post-verbal field indicated morphologically (e.g., overt focus marker po) or syntactically (e.g., cleft constructions); and (d) the syntax of body part expressions with a particular reference to the Binding Theory (Chomsky 1986). This study thus offers a collection of distinct empirical puzzles that seem both theoretically and typologically significant. I explicitly analyze the distribution of lexical categories within the clause with a particular emphasis on a number of principles that govern their surface representations. / Beside the wide range of phenomena covered in this analysis, I also indicate aspects of Shupamem that could be further explored. These aspects include the process of nasal place assimilation, vowel length and tones, the syntax of locative expressions and serial verbs.