The issue of markedness of tonal accents in North Germanic (most Swedish and Norwegian dialects) has never been settled. For a long time, it looked like there was reasonable agreement that the distinction was privative and that it was accent 2 that was marked, accent 1 representing default intonation (Sweet, 1877:155, Elert, 1964:197, Haugen, 1967, Kristoffersen, 1993, Riad, 1998). Recently – a...

Semantic theories of number currently debate whether the plural is weak (referring to both collections and individuals) or strong (referring to collections but not individuals). The former view holds that the plural is ‘unmarked’ as it is less specific; for the latter view, the singular is simpler and therefore ‘unmarked’. This paper examines the inverse number marking system of Dagaare (Gur; N...

On the origin of language: tracing the evolution of the mother tongue. This welcome volume illustrates once more how important historical data can be in linguistic argumentation and how exciting work on the diachronic innovation of linguistic phenomena can be. Several of the volume's twelve chapters address key issues in contemporary linguistic theory and the light that diachronic data can shed...

An important goal of phonological theory has been the elucidation of "action at a distance." This term refers to processes, such as assimilations or dissimilations, in which the trigger segment and affected segment are not string-adjacent; there are segments that intervene, yet seem not to participate in the process. Transparency of this sort raises questions. How and why does it occur? What de...

The loss of regular case endings in modern German has led to highly syncretic noun paradigms that neutralise many of the distinctions retained in more conservative determiner and adjective paradigms. Genitive and dative are, for all intents and purposes, the only cases marked in noun paradigms. Strong nonfeminine nouns have a genitive singular in -s. Strong nouns whose plural ends in a schwa or...

The symbolic number comparison task has been widely used to investigate the cognitive representation and underlying processes of multi-digit processing. The standard procedure establish numerical distance compatibility effects in such paradigms usually entails asking participants indicate larger two presented Arabic numbers rather than smaller number...

So far this dissertation has focused on word-level noniterativity. This chapter examines noniterative postlexical phenomena, processes that extend beyond the word. Constraints such as NonFinality make demands of word edges, and it would not be surprising to find that neighboring words are called on to help satisfy these demands through (noniterative) spreading across the word boundary. For exam...