Table of Contents
Volume 74
Number 3 (September 1998)

 

Articles
Quatrain form in English folk verse  Bruce P. Hayes & Margaret MacEachern  473
The origins of consonant-vowel metathesis  Juliette Blevins & Andrew Garrett 508
Semantic typology and spatial conceptualization  Eric Pederson, Eve Danziger, David Wilkins, Stephen Levinson,Sotaro Kita, & Gunter Senft  557 
Um infixation and prefixation in Toba Batak Megan J. Crowhurst  590
     
Discussion Note    
Amerind personal pronouns: A reply to Campbell Johanna Nichols & David A. Peterson  605
     
Reviews     
Ringe: On the chronology of sound changes in Tocharian. Volume 1: From Proto-Indo-Europeanto Proto-Tocharian  D. Q. Adams   
Iida: Context and binding in Japanese  T. Gunji  617
Freidin (ed.): Current issues in comparative grammar  M. Laughren  620 
Briggs (ed.): Disorderly discourse: Narrative, conflict, and inequality  J. Stanlaw   617 
Brustad et al. : Al-kitaab fii ta..allum al-..arabiyya:A textbook for beginning Arabic, Part 1;Younes: Elementary Arabic: An integrated approach: Student workbook  M. Awad  627
Schiller et al. (eds.): Autolexical theory: Ideas and methods  W. J. de Reuse  629 
Thomason (ed.): Contact languages: A wider perspective  A. P. Grant  631 
Lee: The Whorf theory complex: A critical reconstruction  J. E. Joseph  634 
Yngve: From grammar to science: New foundations for general linguistics  C. Mills  636 
Gumperz & Levinson (eds.): Rethinking linguistic relativity  J. Brody  638 
Martinez-Gil & Morales-Front (eds.): Issues in the phonology and morphology of the major Iberian languages  B. E. Bullock  640 
Hock & Joseph: Language history, language change, and language relationship: An introduction to historical and comparative linguistics  J. F. Eska  642 
Dickey: Greek forms of address from Herodotus to Lucian  J. T. Katz  644 
Schwartzchild: Pluralities  D. T. Langendoen  648 
     
Book Notices    652
Publications Received    690

ABSTRACTS

Quatrain form in English folk verse
Bruce P. Hayes
UCLA
Margaret MacEachern
University of Pittsburgh 

Quatrains in English folk verse are governed by laws that regulate the patterns of truncation (nonfilling of metrical positions) at the end of lines. Each truncation pattern (we claim 26) is adhered to consistently through multiple stanzas and defines a verse type. Our descriptive goal is to account for why these and only these truncation patterns exist. Our crucial hypothesis is that the function of truncated lines is to render SALIENT certain layers in the natural constituency of the quatrain: the line, the couplet, or the quatrain as a whole. All three cannot be rendered salient at once, so the saliency constraints conflict. Each saliency constraint also conflicts with metrical constraints, which require that metrical positions be filled with appropriate syllables and stresses. The twenty-six well-formed quatrain types each represent a particular prioritization of the conflicting constraints.

We formalize this in optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993): the inventory of types is derived as the factorial typology of our constraint set; namely, the set of all outputs of all grammars obtained by freely ranking the violable constraints. We also account for differing text frequencies in our data corpus by assigning each constraint a range of possible strengths, and from this develop an optimality-theoretic account of gradient well-formedness judgments.

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The origins of consonant-vowel metathesis
Juliette Blevins
University of Western Australia
Andrew Garrett
University of California, Berkeley

We argue against the prevailing view that metathesis is somehow less natural than phonetically than other processes and distinguished by a relatively greater phonological motivation. We survey cases of consonant-vowel metathesis -- both synchronic processes and diachronic changes --with the goal of understanding how metathesis sound changes arise. We identify two types of CV metathesis, with distinct synchronic properties and distinct historical origins, and we argue that the two types do have natural, phonetic bases and fundamental commonalities.

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Semantic typology and spatial conceptualization
Eric Pederson
University of Oregon
Eve Danziger
University of Virginia
David Wilkins
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguitics
Stephen Levinson
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguitics
Sotora Kita
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguitics
Gunter Senft
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguitics

This project collected linguistic data for spatial relations across a typologically and genetically varied set of languages. In the linguistic analysis, we focus on the ways in which propositions may be functionally equivalent across the linguistic communities while nonetheless representing semantically quite distinctive frames of reference. Running nonlinguistic experiments on subjects from these language communities, we find that a population's cognitive frame of reference correlates with the linguistic frame of reference within the same referential domain.

 

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Um infixation and prefixation in Toba Batak
 
Megan J. Crowhurst
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill


This report examines the behavior of a morpheme um in Toba Batak (Malayo-Polynesian) which alternates as a prefix or infix, and argues that the observed variation is conditioned by constraints on consonant clusters. Thus, Toba Batak shows that segmental factors may crucially influence the linear position of affixes, in contrast with a wealth of cases cited in the prosodic morphology literature in support of claims that the distributional properties of morphemes are often conditioned by prosodic structure. In addition, evidence from several sources on Toba Batak suggest that um in this language has been migrating from infixed to prefixed positions over time, and that taken as a whole, the stages involved in this change are linguistically coherent. This pattern of shift has interesting implications for typology and for theories of language evolution.
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LIST OF BOOK NOTICES IN THIS ISSUE

 

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