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Full-Text Articles in European Languages and Societies
Number Marking In Western Armenian: A Non-Argument For Outwardly-Sensitive Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy, Bert Vaux, Neil Myler, Karlos Arregi
Number Marking In Western Armenian: A Non-Argument For Outwardly-Sensitive Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy, Bert Vaux, Neil Myler, Karlos Arregi
Bert Vaux
The Western Armenian possessive plural data originally reported in Vaux (1998, 2003) have been asserted by Wolf 2011 to involve outwardly-sensitive phonologically conditioned allomorphy, a phenomenon widely argued to be unattested (Carstairs-McCarthy 1987; Paster 2006) and predicted to be impossible by the tenets of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993; Bobaljik 2000). We show that the full complexity of the Western Armenian system is better captured in an account that makes no reference to outwardly-sensitive phonological conditioning of this sort. The analysis is based on standard DM mechanisms of morpheme copying, displacement, and spellout (Harris and Halle 2005, Arregi and …
Retroflex Variation And Methodological Issues: A Reply To Simonsen, Moen, And Cowen (2008), Janne Bondi Johannessen, Bert Vaux
Retroflex Variation And Methodological Issues: A Reply To Simonsen, Moen, And Cowen (2008), Janne Bondi Johannessen, Bert Vaux
Bert Vaux
We argue that the differences in the articulation of Norwegian retroflex consonants described by Simonsen, Moen, and Cowen (2008) as individual variation may instead be due to factors such as individual and dialectal background, rather than variation across a single variety. Our main argument is based on existing dialect literature and speech corpus data, which show that the phonemes involved in the retroflexion process are not present in the same linguistic contexts in all dialects. SMC’s experimental stimuli and conditions include linguistic contexts which do not necessarily induce retroflexion naturally, and therefore cannot be relied upon to provide an accurate …
Obscurity In Medieval Texts, Lucie Doležalová, Jeff Rider, Alessandro Zironi
Obscurity In Medieval Texts, Lucie Doležalová, Jeff Rider, Alessandro Zironi
Jeff Rider
Modern readers of medieval texts often find them obscure. Some of this obscurity is accidental and inevitable due to the historical and cultural distance that separates modern readers from medieval authors, but medieval readers and authors also appear to have simply had a higher tolerance for textual obscurity than we do and even to have viewed obscurity as desirable and a virtue. They did not believe that obscurity could ever be eradicated and were not scared of the indescribable, indivisible, and ungraspable; they accepted reality as complex and ultimately unintelligible. Obscurity was not simply a riddle to be solved. It …