This study discusses the structure of Ateso, an Eastern Nilotic language. Based on interview and recorded data from fieldwork conducted in both Uganda and Kenya, where Ateso is spoken, the study provides the first comprehensive description of the phonology, morphology and syntax of the language. The main findings of this study are as follows: The key feature of Ateso's phonological structure is that vowel alternation strategies are constrained by three harmony rules: root-control, feature-control, and, finally, mid-vowel assimilation. While Ateso shares this structure with the other Eastern Nilotic languages, it has its unique features as well. For example, while the other members of the Eastern Nilotic family have lost the vowel */ä/, Ateso has retained it phonetically. Ateso's noun morphology has noun-inflectional affixes associated with gender- and number marking. The language employs noun prefixes for gender and uses suffixes to express number and to derive words from others. With regard to its verbal morphology, Ateso verb forms are inflected for a variety of functions. Inflectional categories such as person, number, tense, aspect and mood are marked on the verb either segmentally or supra-segmentally. Tense is expressed suprasegmentally by tone on the nucleus of verb roots, while different morphemes mark person, number, aspect and mood. The discussion of Ateso verb morphology covers verbal derivations and extensions; namely, causatives, ventives, itives, datives, iterative, passives and instrumentals. Regarding its syntactic structure, as a VS/VO language, Ateso allows for a complete clause made up of an inflected verb only, or an inflected verb followed by one or two NPs/or an NP and a pronoun. The language can also have sentence structures involving strategies such as coordination, subordination and clause chaining.

This dissertation is concerned with F0 downtrends in Tokyo Japanese: time-dependent declination, post-accent downtrend, i.e. catathesis, and post-FOCUS compression of F0 movement. I investigate in Part I (Chapters 2 and 3) how “local” or “global” those downtrends are. In that part of the thesis, I focus on the time-dependent declination (Chapter 2) and catathesis (Chapter 3). Though they have been considered to be global phenomena, I show more local aspects of those downtrends. The time-dependent declination is usually formalized as a gradually declining slope of the base line unfolding over the whole utterance or across phrases. In Chapter 2, however, I argue for an additional “tone-bound” declination slope which unfolds only between two neighboring tones. This accounts for my observation that F0 of the second tone (T2) gets substantially lower as the duration between two neighboring tones (T1 and T2) increases, while tones that follow T2 are barely affected by the duration change. The post-accent downtrend, i.e. catathesis, has been formalized as tonal space lowering. In Chapter 3, however, I propose a local “tone-by-tone” scaling model to account for catathesis . The local tone-by-tone scaling model correctly predicts that the “magnitude” of catathesis of a post-accent tone Ti diminishes as more tones intervene between Ti and the preceding pitch accent. In contrast, the global pitch range lowering model incorrectly predicts that all post-accent tones equally undergo catathesis regardless of the number of tones intervening between them and the preceding pitch accent. Another important question, examined in Part II (Chapters 4, 5 and 6), is the “structural” vs. “non-structural” character of the post-FOCUS F0 compression. According to the structural view of the post-FOCUS compression, the phenomenon is a result of the absence of phonological phrase boundaries (i.e. dephrasing) after FOCUS. The non-structural view is that the phenomenon is a result of FOCUS affecting the phonetic interpretation of tones without manipulating the hierarchical organization of phonological phrase structure. I conclude that those views are both correct. Some aspects of the post-FOCUS F0 reduction are only accounted for by dephrasing while there is also a non-structural effect unexplained by dephrasing only.

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En esta investigacion se estudian algunos aspectos de la lengua en unas clases universitarias de espanol como segunda lengua de estudiantes angloparlantes que empiezan a estudiar el segundo, el tercero y el cuarto semestre. El proposito es fijarnos en el momento o etapa de ocurrencia de algunos errores o en la duracion o persistencia de otros para poder identificar la secuencia en la formacion de algunas reglas de los estudiantes. Se investigan tanto los errores (que son en s(')i evidencia de las hipotesis y estrategias formadas por el que aprende) como el desarrollo de algunas formas sintacticamente correctas. Se da una explicacion a veces contrastiva, otras, generativa. En el primer cap(')itulo se estudian las posiciones teoricas modernas sobre la adquisicion de lenguaje: el bijeiviorismo, el neo-bijeiviorismo, el generativismo y la de los procesos cognitivos. Se hace una distincion entre la adquisicion de una primera y una segunda lengua. Se estudian cuatro problemas que se destacan en la adquisicion de una segunda lengua, a saber: (1) la relacion que existe entre la primera y la segunda; (2) la opcion expl(')icita-impl(')icita; (3) la relacion codigo/mensaje; y (4) la adquisicion como un proceso. Se explican el analisis contrastivo, el analisis de errores, y el concepto de interlenguaje. En el cap(')itulo II se desarrolla el concepto de error y se dan sus clases. Se explican las estrategias de aprendizaje. Se presenta el diseno de la investigacion. En el cap(')itulo III se analizan los materiales generados por los estudiantes, identificando los errores, las estrategias y las situaciones no resueltas aun por ellos. Los resultados del analisis del corpus se relaccionan en el cap(')itulo IV con las posiciones actuales sobre la adquisicion. Se termina el trabajo con algunas recomendaciones generales sobre la ensenanza de una segunda lengua.

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