Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

Advisor: Keith Johnson

Object markers alternate between a prefix and a suffix position in the Thetogovela dialect of Moro, an underdocumented Kordofanian language of Sudan. Although the alternation appears to depend on the morphosyntactic category of verb forms, we show that it actually follows from the tonal properties of these verb forms. Verb stems that are usually marked with a default, phonologically predictable leftmost high tone select prefix object markers. The high-toned prefix object marker appears inside the stem, and its high tone serves as the default tone of the stem, obviating the need for...

In this paper, we reexamine tone melody inventories in Mende, a landmark case study in the development of Autosegmental Phonology. We argue for adopting an approach couched within Agreement by Correspondence (ABC) Theory, in which tone melody inventories emerge naturally from the phonological grammar, rooted in independently-motivated principles of similarity and proximity with proven effects in segmental phenomena. The ABC-driven approach allows more fine-grained predictions in OT for the behavior of tone, and unites the analysis of tone and segmental patterns without the need for the...

A widely-cited study investigating effects of recognition difficulty on the phonetic realization of words (Wright, 2004). Factors of lexical competition in vowel articulation. In J. Local, R. Ogden & R. Temple (Eds.), Papers in laboratory phonology, Vol. VI (pp. 26–50)) reported that vowel dispersion, i.e. distance from the center of the talker's F1/F2 space, was greater in words that represented difficult recognition targets (‘...