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This study investigates innovative sound sequences in Japanese. A relatively large number of phonological changes have occurred in the short period of time since WWII, mainly due to an influx of loanwords from English. However, innovative sound sequences have not been accepted in Japanese uniformly. This fact raises two questions. Why are some innovative sound sequences fully accepted in Japanese while others are still foreignisms? Why are certain sound sequences acceptable in one situation, but not so in others?Previous studies on innovative sound sequences in modern standard Japanese have tried to solve these problems by establishing innovative lexical strata, such as "Assimilated Foreign" and "Unassimilated Foreign." However, this study found that the distribution of innovative sound sequences is much more complex than previously believed. Furthermore, in many cases, the acceptance of innovative sound sequences is word-by-word or speaker-by-speaker. This suggests that the cause of the distribution of innovative sound sequences in Japanese is better described as an intricate interaction among various extra-grammatical factors, such as processes of borrowing, speakers' socioeconomic status, influence of English education, acoustic and articulatory phonetics, the writing system, and historical linguistic factors.

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The goals of the dissertation are documentation and description of the language, and investigation of theoretical issues raised by the language data. Nuu-chah-nulth, which constitutes, along with Ditidaht and Makah, the Southern branch of the Wakashan family, is in immediate danger of extinction. There are many factors contributing to endangerment, but above all, there is an enormous generation-gap between people who can speak the language and people who cannot, which may ultimately be too deep and broad to bridge without significant linguistic or educational measures. The problem is compounded by the fact the there is very little documentation of the language, hampering both linguistic research and efforts in the realm of education/revitalisation of the language. This work will contribute to documentation of Nuu-chah-nulth, which will ultimately help Nuu-chah-nulth people to develop education materials for their children. Although previous studies describe and analyse Tseshaht and Kyuquot, two of the 12 Nuu-chah-nulth dialects, there is not much comprehensive work where both the Nuu-chah-nulth sound system and related phonological phenomena and its morphology, are both well-described and analysed. Nuu-chah-nulth has unique and interesting dialect variation as well as linguistic phenomena which require organisation and generalisation. This thesis focuses on the description of the Ahousaht dialect. The documentation, in conjunction with previous work, will help us understand Nuu-chah-nulth better in terms of the different evolution between dialects as well as both linguistic and typological characteristics of the language. It is important to investigate the phonology and morphology of Nuu-chah-nulth from the perspective of linguistic theory. Many phonological and morphological processes in Nuu-chah-nulth raise interesting questions in terms of universality, markedness, learnability, variability, and typological issues. Theoretical treatments of linguistic phenomena will help us understand the language itself better, and general characteristics of human language as well. I discuss the segmental phonology of the language in Chapter 3, including the treatment of pervasive phonological processes such as glottalisation, lenition, (de)labialisation, vowel lengthening, vowel shortening, and vowel alternation due to variable vowels; I treat prosodic phonology in Chapter 4, the morphological structure of words in Chapter 2, and morphological processes such as reduplication and allomorphy in Chapter 5. I treat these phenomena within Optimality Theory, due to its direct encoding of claims concerning universality, language variation, and typology.

This thesis is a comparison of the glottalized resonants in Sancaean and St'at'imcets, two Salish languages. The Licensing by Cue hypothesis as proposed by Steriade (1997) accounts for the distribution of glottalized resonants based on their phonetic cues. The goal of this thesis is to apply the Licensing by Cue hypothesis to the glottalized resonants in Sancaean and St'at'imcets, and evaluate its success in accounting for these two languages. Sancaean is a North Straits, Coast Salish language which does not permit glottalized resonants word-initially. St'at'imcets is an Interior Salish language which allows glottalized resonants word-initially but only in a particular morphological context. Licensing by Cue suggests that glottalized resonants do not occur word initially because of a lack of a supportive context for cues. The distribution of resonants glottalized as a part of a morphological process, namely the actual in Sancaean and the inchoative in St'at'imcets, should also be governed by the same phonetic factors. This thesis first examines the glottal timing of glottalized resonants in both languages. Preliminary phonetic evidence is given for glottalized resonants in Sancaean, which confirm that glottalization is attracted to stress. In contrast, in St'at'imcets, it is perceived that glottalization is repulsed by stress. Modifications are proposed, which enable the hypothesis to account for the timing of glottal events. It is argued, however, that even after such modification, the Licensing by Cue hypothesis is not sufficient to account for the distribution of non-derived glottalized resonants. The same is shown to be true for derived glottalized resonants. The distribution of glottalized resonants is governed by the interaction of three levels of constraints: phonetic constraints, which determine glottal timing, and phonological and morphological constraints, which govern the distribution of glottalised resonants. Also briefly discussed in this thesis are issues related to the relationship between /ʡ/ and glottalized resonant, whether [cg] or [creak] should be used to characterise glottalised resonants, and the Proto-Salish morpheme for the imperfective. Based on the research presented in this thesis, it is concluded that Sancaean and St'at'imcets glottalised resonants do not show strong support for a hypothesis which argues for a strong phonetic presence in phonology. While a cue-based approach can account for the phonetic timing of glottal events for glottalized resonants, segment distribution is determined by phonological and morphological constraints.

This thesis investigates the factors influencing the adaptation of foreign words to English, beyond traditional phonological parameters such as sonority distance. The data examined were produced in an on-line adaptation task to study purely linguistic rather than orthographic or historical influences. The adapted words contain only lesser-studied phonotactic problems rather than segmental ill-formedness. The choice of Russian as a donor and English as a borrowing language allow the study of adaptations in a setting which allows a further strategy of alteration of ill-formed consonant clusters beyond vowel epenthesis and consonant deletion, namely the substitution of segments to change one cluster into another. In contrast to previous research, English production of Russian stimuli with initial consonant clusters showed that segment change is applied frequently, comparable to the amount of vowel epenthesis. Extensive variation was observed, both in ratio of successful production, and in the choice and distribution of adaptation strategy. The factors in adaptation investigated were the sonority distance of the foreign clusters, as well as concepts which have received much recent attention within phonology, namely gradient grammaticality, similarity and frequency: English native speaker judgments were collected about the perceived grammaticality of foreign clusters and the similarity between targets and adaptations, while the frequency of possible adaptations in English was calculated from a corpus of spoken English. Results show that sonority cannot explain the variation in adaptation. Furthermore, frequency has no influence on the choice of adaptation; however, higher perceived badness results in a higher percentage of adaptations, and perceived similarity is decisive for the choice of adaptations. A comparison of similarity judgments of English and Russian listeners suggested that, in keeping with Steriade (2001), there are some cross-linguistically corresponding rankings of similarity; however, differences between languages due to phonotactics and phonetic detail were also found. In summary, the experiment results suggest that the adaptation of loanwords occurs in both in perception and production; furthermore, it is determined both by L1 specifics and cross-linguistic tendencies, an thus neither a straightforward application of L1 phonology nor completely independent of language background.

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