Metathesis poses challenges for a typologically constrained theory of phonology: despite being simple to describe, its distribution is highly restricted, making it difficult to create analyses that make predictions while not overgenerating. Here, I investigate metathesis in Uab Meto (Austronesian; Indonesia), an understudied language with CV metathesis that is synchronic and productive. Drawing on original fieldwork, I argue that metathesis is not transposition, but instead a serial delete-and-spread mechanism (cf. Takahashi 2018, 2019). To support this, I present a deep case study into the language’s phonology, showing that metathesis arises from spreading, deletion and epenthesis patterns. I propose that synchronic metathesis systems like Uab Meto’s can only emerge from the successive application of these mechanisms, and hypothesise that true transposition, if it exists, only arises through morpheme-specific operations. This study thus presents a new look onto the typology of synchronic metathesis, and offers an explanatory account of its typological rarity.
This article posits a theory of iterative stress that separates each facet of the stress map into its constituent parts, or ‘atoms’. Through the well-defined notion of complexity provided by Formal Language Theory, it is shown that this division of the stress map results in a more restrictive characterisation of iterative stress than a single-function analysis does. While the single-function approach masks the complexity of the atomic properties present in the pattern, the compositional analysis makes it explicitly clear. It also demonstrates the degree to which, despite what appear to be significant surface differences in the patterns, the calculation of the stress function is largely the same, even between quantity-sensitive and quantity-insensitive patterns. These stress compositions are limited to one output-local function to iterate stress, and a small number of what I call edge-oriented functions to provide ‘cleanup’ when the iteration function alone fails to capture the pattern.
Features are standard in segmental analysis but have been less successfully applied to tone. Subtonal features have even been argued to be less satisfactory for the representation of African tone than tonal primitives such as H, M, L (Hyman 2010; Clements et al. 2010). I argue that the two-feature system of Yip (1980) and Pulleyblank (1986) offers a straightforward account of the tonology of Laal, an endangered, three-tone isolate of southern Chad – in particular properties of the Mid tone that are otherwise difficult to account for, namely the avoidance of complex patterns involving M, and a pervasive M-to-L lowering process, both straightforwardly analysed as subtonal assimilation. Other tonal operations in Laal are shown to involve full-tone behaviour, justifying a tone geometry à la Snider (1999, 2020) where subtonal features are linked to a Tonal Root Node, giving tones the ability to be either fully or partially active, just like segments.
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：