This dissertation consists of a description of the grammar of Tila Chol. Chol is one of the 30 Mayan languages spoken in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. This language is used by nearly 200,000 speakers, distributed in two main dialects: Tila Chol and Tumbalá Chol. The data for this thesis are mostly from Tila Chol. This dissertation includes aspects of phonology, morphology, and syntax from a contrastive and typological perspective. The grammar begins with general information about the speakers and the language (chapter one). Chapter two is a description of phonology, which includes the inventory of sounds, stress, syllabic patterns and phonological processes. Chapter three presents the properties of root/word classes, as well as affixes and particles. Chapter four is about the person and number markers. Chapter five provides the main features of word classes, such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, positionals, affect words, adverbs, minor classes and clitics. The next chapter (chapter six) deals with the elements that verbs can take, including incorporation of modifiers and noun incorporation. Chapter seven provides the main features of non-verbal predicates. In chapter eight, the structures of noun phrases, such as possessors, determiners and modifiers are presented. Chapter nine describes the structure of simple sentences in both verbal and non-verbal predicates. Chapter ten is devoted to the operations that changevalence, including passive, antipassive, reflexive/reciprocal, causative and applicative. Chapter eleven deals with information structure in the discourse, specifically topicalization and focus. Chapter twelve is a brief description of passive constructions as operations triggered by paradigmatic gaps related to obviation as documented in Algonquian languages. Chapter thirteen deals with complex predicate structures. Finally, in Chapter fourteen, the complex sentences are described, including complement clauses, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, conditional clauses and coordination. This grammar will provide useful information for current Chol projects related to strengthening and revitalization efforts, such as in the construction of pedagogical materials and will also be useful for the field of linguistics or other related areas. / text

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Among the many ways in which sounds alternate in the world's languages, changes in the order of sounds (metathesis) are relatively rare. Mutsun, a Southern Costanoan language of California which was documented extensively before the death of its last speaker in 1930, displays three patterns of synchronic consonant-vowel (CV) metathesis. Two of these patterns appear to have remained productive while the language was actively spoken. In stem-deriving metathesis, many disyllabic noun stems ending in a VC string (as well as a few trisyllabic noun stems) alternate with semantically related verb stems ending in a CV string: e.g.,cayic ‘strength’ ~ cayci ‘to be strong’. In reflexive metathesis, a subset of verb stems, which are normally vowel-final in all environments, surface in consonant-final form in the presence of the reflexive suffix –pu and/or the reciprocal suffix -mu, as in kitro ‘to dress, to clothe’ ~ kitorpu ‘to get dressed, to dress oneself’. Finally, in suffix metathesis, the plural and locative suffixes (as well as the desiderative/irrealis enclitic) alternate between CCV and CVC forms depending on whether the preceding stem ends in a consonant or a vowel. Based on data from a large corpus of archival records of the language compiled over a span of more than a century, all three patterns of metathesis in Mutsun appear to defy the types of phonological analysis that have been proposed in the literature to account for metathesis in a variety of other languages. The phonetic and phonological factors claimed to motivate metathesis in other languages, such as misinterpretation of acoustic cues, stress attraction, sonority hierarchies, and positional restrictions, are absent in Mutsun. In this dissertation, I argue that prosodic analyses based on syllable weight and prosodic templates are required to account for Mutsun metathesis. Mutsun stem metathesis in particular has less in common, morphophonologically speaking, with metathesis in other languages than it does with reduplication or templatic morphology.

Recent studies in the acquisition of a second language (L2) phonology have revealed that orthography can influence, both positively and negatively, the way L2 learners come to establish target-like lexical representations. The majority of these studies, however, involve language pairs relying on a Roman-based script. In comparison, the influence of a foreign or unfamiliar written representation on L2 phonolexical acquisition remains understudied. This dissertation aims to fill this gap. CHAPTER 2 considers the effects of multiple scripts (e.g. Arabic, Cyrillic, Roman-Maltese, etc.) on the acquisition of the Arabic voiceless pharyngeal fricative /ħ/ and the voiceless uvular fricative /χ/ word-initially. Monolingual native speakers of English participated in a set of five word-learning experiments where they were instructed to learn six pairs of minimally contrastive words, each associated with a unique visual referent. In each experiment, a different script configuration was manipulated. After an initial learning phase, participants were then tested on their phonological acquisition of these L2 minimal pairs. Results show significant differences in phonological accuracy between groups of learners exposed to varying degrees of script unfamiliarity. Specifically, complete script foreignness exerted an inhibitory effect on L2 phonolexical acquisition, while semi-foreign scripts exercised differential inhibitory effects based on whether grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) also activated L1 phonological units. Two follow-up spelling experiments were also conducted in an attempt to find a more intuitive, symbolic representation of these L2 phonemes. While spellers managed to find various ways to symbolically encode /χ/-words from /ħ/-words, when presented in minimal pairs (but not when presented randomly), no form-consistent pattern emerged from their spelling renditions. These spelling experiments nevertheless support the interpretation that L1 GPCs are likely activated in the course of L2 phonological processing. CHAPTER 3 examines the acquisition of another nonnative phonological contrast, that of Japanese singleton/geminate consonants word-medially. In another set of five word-learning experiments manipulating various aspects of unfamiliar scripts (e.g. Hiragana, Roman/Cyrillic blended), it was found that the acquisition of such a length-based contrast was significantly affected by the foreign written input only when the unfamiliar characters encoding the contrast were graphically highlighted (by way of font coloring and underline) or when they did not convey any information about the durational dimension of the L2 contrast (i.e. when both singletons and geminates were represented with a single character, instead of two for the geminates). These inhibitory effects show that learners are susceptible to be confused by small details featured in unfamiliar written representations presented to them in the course of L2 phonoloxical acquisition. Similar to Chapter 2, two follow-up spelling experiments were conducted. Here, spellers failed to symbolically mark a difference between singleton and geminate auditory items, whether they were presented randomly or in minimal pairs. This lack of differentiation in writing suggests that a consonantal singleton/geminate contrast is a priori not so intuitive to native English speakers. The contributions of this dissertation are manifold. First, the present results provide strong evidence that, aside from recognized acoustic and phonological features influencing the acquisition of a second language sound system, extra-linguistic elements such as written representations also contribute to the acquisitional experience of L2 learners. Furthermore, such findings show that exposure to unfamiliar written representations can significantly inhibit the successful creation of target-like phonological representations, an outcome that has thus far not been attested. Second, it provides additional and complementary research in the subfield of L2 acquisition dealing with the interaction of phonological and orthographic knowledge. The work presented here indeed expands the scope of L2 contrasts and script treatments thus far investigated. Third, implications for second language teaching and loanword phonology can be envisaged. Methods geared towards the acquisition of L2 sounds for instance could be designed taking into account the results obtained here, namely, the fact that a foreign written support may not always be beneficial to learners, depending on the degree of familiarity with the L2 writing system.

A central claim of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, McCarthy and Prince 1993a) is that phonological variation can be modeled through the variable ranking of universal constraints. In this thesis, I test this claim by examining variation in the tongue root vowel harmony system in a number of closely related yet distinct Bantu languages of Congo and Zaire. The twenty-odd languages are drawn from each of Guthrie 1967's eight Bantu C. subgroups and are shown to vary along a number of dimensions. One is morphological, related to whether or not the harmonic element in the lexical root extends to prefixes and suffixes. This variation is shown to follow from the variable ranking of constraints that seek to ALIGN the harmonic feature, [retracted tongue root] ([rtr]) with the edges of the morphological domains STEM and WORD. A second parameter of variation concerns the relationship between high vowels and [rtr]. A third dimension involves the interaction of [rtr] with the low vowel [a] under harmony. Here, three patterns involving (i) low vowel assimilation, (ii) low vowel opacity, or (iii) low vowel transparency under harmony are shown to follow from the variable ranking of a few constraints. A significant theme that emereges in the study is recognizing and characterizing the distinct morphological and phonological domain edges involved in vowel harmony. An important contribution of this study is in bringing to light a language family where phonological tongue height, in this case expressed by the feature [low], is shown to be incompatible with tongue root retraction, as expressed in the feature [rtr]. Although the gestures of tongue body lowering and tongue root retraction are sympathetic in the articulatory dimension and in their acoustic effect, they are seen to be phonologically hostile, in fact, because of the redundancy relation between them. This redundancy-based phonological incompatibility is implemented via licensing-failure: [low] fails to "license" [rtr] because lowness implies retraction (Ito, Mester and Padgett 1994).

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This thesis explores three fundamental issues in the phonology and morphology of Ethiopian Semitic languages: mobile morphology, reduplication and epenthesis. In each chapter I draw on comparative evidence from different Ethiopian Semitic languages, an approach which provides greater insight into how the languages vary with respect to these three issues, and how the issues themselves are best analyzed. / The first issue is that of 'mobile morphology' a term I coin to describe the ability of a particular morphological category to be realized on various segments within a stem. The two major types in the South Ethio-Semitic languages are palatalization and labialization. I develop an analysis of palatalization in five different languages which relies on a hierarchy of preferred targets, along with a number of constraints regulating the appearance of palatalization within the stem. / Ethio-Semitic languages have several different types of reduplication. I draw a distinction between phonological and morphological reduplication and argue that phonological reduplication should be viewed as copying rather long-distance geminate structures created by spreading. I also examine the interaction of reduplication with mobile morphology and I present an analysis of double reduplication, showing how languages will avoid the creation of double reduplication relationships. / I develop an analysis of epenthesis which contrasts the behaviour of one set of languages which epenthesize following final consonant clusters with other languages which epenthesize between consonant clusters. I show that while all Ethio-Semitic languages follow the same general pattern, this may be overridden by templatic constraints and more importantly, by sonority considerations holding of adjacent syllables in coda-onset sequences. This last observation is important because it shows that while languages may on the whole violate heterosyllabic contact constraints, in particular circumstances, the constraints will be obeyed, giving rise to an emergence of the unmarked scenario.

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The lack of culturally appropriate norms for assessing the speech and language status of Malaysian children has been an ongoing issue in Malaysia. At present, there are no normative data against which to assess the phonological skills of Malaysian children. Malaysian Chinese children are usually bilingual or multilingual. They acquire English, Mandarin Chinese and Malay during their preschool years. English that is used in Malaysia is commonly recognized as Malaysian English (MalE). MalE has distinctive phonological characteristics that are different from those of so-called Standard English (SE). However, the variations of MalE may not be completely understood by many speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in Malaysia, and this may lead to difficulty in differentiating speech differences resulting from MalE dialectal features and true speech disorders. As well as establishing speech norms for MalE speaking children, information is needed about the current assessment practices of the phonological development of MalE speaking children. Three studies were carried out for the present thesis. The first study was designed to provide insight into Malaysian SLPs’ perspectives on the current use of articulation and phonology assessments in the country. It reports the results of a survey of 38 Malaysian SLPs in term of the types of articulation and phonological assessments currently used, SLPs’ perceptions about the adequacy and accuracy of current articulation and phonological assessment in meeting clinical needs, the experiences of SLPs in using current articulation and phonological assessments, as well as their perception of the need for further research in the areas of articulation and phonology. The findings indicated that informal articulation or phonological assessments were widely used. Only a minority of the respondents used standardized articulation or phonological assessments. The majority of the respondents felt that the lack of locally developed standardized tests and the utilization of informal assessments of articulation and phonology in their clinics did not provide accurate diagnoses or intervention plans. They felt that there was a need for collecting phonological developmental data and creating articulation and phonology assessments for Malaysian children. The second study was designed to identify characteristics of the consonant and vowel inventories of MalE as well as phonetic realizations of speech sounds, by investigating the speech production of ten adult Chinese speakers of MalE. The participants were asked to read a list of 206 single words which contained all expected MalE consonants, consonant clusters and vowels. These speech sounds were sampled in several different words and in different syllable-word positions. This study goes beyond previous studies of MalE phonology by using a quantitative auditory phonetic analysis. The characteristics observed were first categorized according to their frequency of occurrence and then further grouped into categories based on the possible influences of British English or American English as well as local Malaysian languages (Mandarin Chinese and Malay) and dialects. The interference patterns within MalE resulting from the influence of local languages and Chinese dialects were also discussed. The phonological features of MalE which converged with developmental phonological processes in SE children were explored. An understanding of the phonological features and realizations of MalE speech sounds is important because this will help speech-language pathologists to differentiate dialectal phonological features exhibited by MalE speaking children from phonological differences and disorders. The third study which was also the major study of this thesis was designed to provide valid and reliable normative data for the phonological development of MalE speaking Chinese children between the ages of 3 and 7 years. This study provided a description of the children’s phonological system in MalE in terms of i) age of acquisition of speech sounds, ii) speech sound accuracy and iii) phonological process use. 264 typically developing English speaking Malaysian Chinese children between the ages of 3 and 7 years were recruited to participate in this cross-sectional study. In a pilot study, eleven words were eliminated from the list used in the second study, leaving a list of 195 words which sampled consonants, consonant clusters and vowels in various syllable-word positions and phonotactic structures. The words were illustrated and presented colourfully in composite pictures to elicit a large and well-controlled single word speech sample. All the speech data gained were transcribed phonetically and analyzed quantitatively. The findings revealed that MalE children’s speech sound accuracy was underestimated when MalE dialectal features were not taken into consideration. MalE speaking children exhibited phonological acquisition patterns that were both similar and different to SE. The differences found were mainly due to the cross-linguistic effects of Mandarin Chinese and Malay which were acquired at the same time by MalE speaking children. The influence of Mandarin Chinese and Malay appeared to accelerate or delay the phonological acquisition of MalE based on phonetic similarity theory. The findings of the present study highlight the need to consider MalE dialectal features in the phonological analysis of MalE speaking children. The differences in phonological acquisition of MalE and SE indicate that the norms of SE are not suitable to be used for MalE speaking children. This study will provide useful and locally appropriate normative developmental data on phonological acquisition for MalE speaking Chinese children. Speech-language pathologists in Malaysia will be able to use it as a guideline in assessing and treating clients with articulation and phonological disorders. In addition, these normative developmental data are a prerequisite to the eventual establishment of a phonological assessment tool specifically designed for MalE.