IULC Publications

Indiana University Linguistics Club Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Volume

To commemorate 25 years of distributing papers in linguistics, IULC is pleased to announce the publication of a special collection.

Phonological Factors of Conjugation Class Shift in the Romance Languages

by Stuart Davis and Donna Jo Napoli

While there has been much work positing why many original Latin second conjugation verbs have switched conjugation classes in the development of most of the Romance languages, very little of this work has considered phonological factors. The authors contend that phonological factors have played a crucial role in identifying which verbs are 'candidates' for undergoing conjugation class shift and which are not. Specifically, original second conjugation verbs whose roots ended in two consonants have switched conjugation classes in the daughter languages that still distinguish between the historical second and third conjugations. The authors support their contention with data from two Eastern Romance languages, Italian and Romanian.

Gender Assignment to Nonwords in French: Implications for the role of the final syllable in lexical processing and organization of the mental lexicon

by Debra M. Hardison

Debra Hardison focuses on the role of the syllable in the organization of stored lexical information in French, specifically with regard to the representation of grammatical gender. Further analysis of the gender-noun ending correspondences reported in Tucker, Lambert and Rigault (1977), suggests that the gender of inanimate nouns is quite predicatble based on the final syllable. Results of additional experimental data are synthesized, including the role of the syllable in the segmentation of speech in French (Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder & Segui 1981), integrating the relatively prominent final syllable (Delattre 1966) into the process of lexical access. Findings are consistent with the optimal organization of phonological information in the lexicon by syllable.

Winnebago Accent: The Rest of the Data

Kenneth L. Miner

One of the controversies in metrical phonology concerns the analysis of the accentuation pattern of Winnebago, a native American language of the Midwest. Winnebago accent is typologically unusual and has been the basis for much discussion in the recent literature on accent. Professor Miner, who has worked on Winnebago for over a decade, provides a wider variety of data on the language than has been previously discussed and shows that these data are problematic for analyses posited by several prominent phonologists. Professor Miner concludes with his own insightful analysis of the Winnebago accentual pattern.

Free Choice Items in English, Serbo-Croatian, and French: A Unified Analysis

Mary Ellen Scullen

By comparing the distribution and interpretation of free-choice (FC) items any, bilo ko 'anyone', and n'importe qui 'anyone' (English, Serbo-Croation, French), Mary Ellen Scullen demonstrates that although FC-items appear in various polarity sensitive (PS) contexts in each language, their interpretation differs. In English, the FC-item is universal. In Serbo-Croatian, it has existential and wide scope readings. In French, it can only have wide scope interpretation. The author accounts for these facts by assuming that these FC-items are subject to different principles of Binding Theory: PS-any to Principle A; FC-any and bilo ko to Principle B; and n'importe qui to Principle C. The semantic representation of FC-items is also considered, and it is suggested that FC-items do not have licensing 'triggers.' Rather, the absence of a fixed truth value for a proposition determines the acceptability of an FC-item.

66 pages
$7.00

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