This thesis deals with aspects of Persian phonology and morpho-phonology which are less studied or controversial, and has two specific goals: (i) to examine the structure of the Persian vowel system with the goal of understanding the asymmetries in patterning of different vowels in the system; (ii) to examine some suffixation processes in Persian with the goal of understanding the seeming irregularities in morphophonemics. The more generals goals of this work are to contribute to the discussions of: (i) determining dimensions of contrast in a vowel system; (ii) interactions of vowels and consonants at a morpheme boundary. Although the main focus of this work is on the synchronic status of these issues in Persian from a theoretical viewpoint, many discussions in the thesis benefit from an historical and/or an experimental investigation. As such, the thesis contributes both to the field of theoretical and experimental phonology, and offers both synchronic and historical perspectives on many issues at hand.

This thesis deals with aspects of Persian phonology and morpho-phonology which are less studied or controversial, and has two specific goals: (i) to examine the structure of the Persian vowel system with the goal of understanding the asymmetries in patterning of different vowels in the system; (ii) to examine some suffixation processes in Persian with the goal of understanding the seeming irregularities in morphophonemics. The more generals goals of this work are to contribute to the discussions of: (i) determining dimensions of contrast in a vowel system; (ii) interactions of vowels and consonants at a morpheme boundary. Although the main focus of this work is on the synchronic status of these issues in Persian from a theoretical viewpoint, many discussions in the thesis benefit from an historical and/or an experimental investigation. As such, the thesis contributes both to the field of theoretical and experimental phonology, and offers both synchronic and historical perspectives on many issues at hand.

This dissertation provides a comprehensive description of the tonal and intonational phonology of Lhasa Tibetan (LT) in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. It is based on recorded data elicited from members of the Tibetan-Canadian community in Ottawa and Toronto. The first two chapters of the dissertation contain background information about LT, a summary of previous research on LT tones and intonation, and an overview of the theoretical framework and conceptual tools used in the rest of the dissertation. The third chapter deals with word tonology. I establish that the prosodic structure of LT brings evidence for four main constituents at or below the word level: a) the mora encodes vowel length contrasts, b) the syllable is the tone-bearing unit (TBU), c) the prosodic word, which is maximally binary, delimits the application of most tonal processes, and d) the prosodic word group, which matches grammatical words, is the domain of downstep. This prosodic structure provides evidence against the universality of the Prosodic Hierarchy (Selkirk, 2002; Nespor and Vogel, 2007) in that it has no phonological phrase, but has two word-level constituents. I then argue that LT has three lexical tones (H, LH, and L) – L being limited to some suffixes – and propose that these lexical tones are subject to tone rules applying within the prosodic word and the prosodic word group. These tone rules are similar to those proposed by Duanmu (1992), but have been improved to accurately predict the tone patterns of long polysyllabic words. Based on phonetic evidence, I also come to the conclusion that LT no longer has stress, and that the stress pattern found in other Bodic varieties has been reinterpreted as a part of the tonal system. The fourth chapter analyses phrasal prosody. I argue that LT forms intonational phrases around clauses and marks them with final lengthening, pitch reset, and a limited set of boundary tones (H% and L%). Although communicative functions and information structure are mostly realized by means of final particles and morphosyntactic devices in LT, I show that boundary tones, focal tones, and deaccenting interact with word tones to form complex melodic patterns. In the fifth chapter, I present a phonologically-based F0 synthesis model to verify the adequacy of the proposed Autosegmental-Metrical model of LT. This F0 synthesis model consists of three main components: a) the tonal targets de ned in previous chapters, b) an F0 interpolation component based on the PENTA model (Xu, 2004), and c) an evaluation component allowing a comparison of the F0 contours of real LT utterances with resynthesized F0 contours of the same utterances. The F0 synthesis model is able to generate F0 contours that approximate the F0 contours of real LT recordings, suggesting that the proposed phonological model adequately captures the overall tonal and intonational phonology of LT.

This study is a discussion of the phonology of Tagalog and Pampango, two of the major Philippine languages. The contrastive analytical description deals both with the segmental and the suprasegmental phonemes. They are analyzed as to their form, structure, and distribution. Tagalog and Pampango phonemes are described using conventional taxonomic phonemes and allophones. The extent of the differences between the two languages with regard to phonology is discussed to point out the problems and the places where they will occur for Pampango learners of Tagalog. The chief difficulty for the Pampango learning Tagalog segmental phonemes is that he may confuse /'/ and /h/. There are cases where he seems to substitute /’/ for /h/, although actually he does not produce the glottal sound but a "breathy glottal stop." He finds final /o/ and /u/ difficult because he makes no distinction between these two sounds. He uses them interchanges ably favoring the higher vowel /u/. All Tagalog diphthongs are missing from Pampango and they constitute a really tremendous problem for the Pampango learner. The problem is so great that he should be taught as a top priority the diphthongs /iw/, /ey/,/ay/, /aw/ and /uy/ which are to be classed as new categories for a Pampango learner of Tagalog. Extensive drill should be given on these items. The rising-falling pitch pattern /231 / of Tagalog will probably be a serious problem for Pampangos because of the tendency to replace it by /213 / or at best /212 /. Much drill should be given to Pampango students in this area because they are likely to carry over their intonation patterns in speaking Tagalog. In general, the pronunciation difficulty of Pampangos learning Tagalog will arise from the systematic differences in phonological structure between the two languages, such as differences between the phonemic inventories, differences in the phonetic realization of phonemes which are being learned by the students, and differences in the distribution of the phonemes which occur in both languages. / Arts, Faculty of / Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies, Department of / Graduate

Phonological processes can be characterized as functions from input strings to output strings, and treating them as mathematical objects like this reveals properties that hold regardless of how we implement them (i.e., with rules, constraints, or other tools). For example, Chandlee (2014) found that a vast majority of phonological processes can be modelled as Strictly Local (SL) functions, which are sensitive to a window of finite size. Long-distance processes like vowel and consonant harmony are exceptions to this generalization, although a key observation is that they look local once irrelevant information is ignored. This thesis shows how such selective attention can be modelled by augmenting SL functions with autosegmental tiers (e.g., Goldsmith, 1976). A single tier is sufficient to capture individual long-distance processes, and having multiple tiers available allows us to model multiple long-distance processes simultaneously as well as interactions between local and non-local patterns. Furthermore, probabilistic variants of these tier-based functions allow for a cognitively plausible model of what Zymet (2015) calls distance-based decay. Unrestricted use of multiple tiers is, however, quite powerful and so I additionally argue that tiersets should be defined from the perspective of individual input elements (i.e., potential process targets). Each input element designates a superset-subset hierarchy of tiers and pays attention to them alone; the tiers specified by another input element are either redundant or irrelevant. Restricting tiersets in this manner has beneficial consequences for learnability as it imparts a structure onto the learner's hypothesis space that can be exploited to great effect. Furthermore, tier-based functions meeting this restriction fail to generate a number of pathological behaviours that can be characterized as subsequential functions, a type of function that has previously been offered as a model of non-local phonological processes (Heinz and Lai, 2013; Luo, 2017; Payne, 2017). In light of their empirical coverage, their comparative lack of pathological predictions, and their efficient learnability, I conclude that tier-based functions act as a more accurate characterization of long-distance phonology.

Literal and free translations of conversational responses flesh out this analysis including stress, tone, and pause of the phonemics of an Arizona dialect of Yaqui.

No description available.

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

No description available.