Abstract This paper investigates place of articulation shifts involving heterosyllabic C [non-coronal] [coronal] clusters. Such phenomena are found, among other languages, in the diachrony Italiot Greek, where three typologically different historical stages observed: (a) no shifts; (b) dorsal > labial shift; (c) dorsal, coronal shift. Drawing on Rice's (1994) model Place node and markedness ...

We present a corpus-based study of methods that have been proposed in the linguistics literature for selecting the semantically unmarked term out of a pair of antonymous adjectives. Solutions to this problem are applicable to the more general task of selecting the positive term from the pair. Using automatically collected data, the accuracy and applicability of each method is quantified, and a ...

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In societies with left-to-right reading direction, left-side vs. right-side behavioral decisions are faster for relatively small vs. large number magnitudes, and vice versa, a phenomenon termed Spatial-Numerical Associations of Response Codes (SNARC) effect. But also for non-numerical sequential items, SNARC-like effects were observed, suggesting a common neurocognitive mechanism based on the o...

The goal of this paper is twofold: first it reviews the distributional properties of tense and lax vowels in a relatively standard dialect of Northern French which still contrasts vowel length, and second, on the basis of these data, it examines the interaction between markedness and faithfulness constraints in Optimality Theory (OT, Prince & Smolensky 1993). The intricate interplay between vow...

Speakers often anticipate how recipients will interpret their utterances. If they wish some other, less obvious interpretation, they may 'mark' their utterance (e.g. with special intonations or facial expressions). We investigated whether two- and three-year-olds recognize when adults mark a non-verbal communicative act--in this case a pointing gesture--as special, and so search for a not-so-ob...