Glyne Piggott | McGill University (original) (raw)

Papers by Glyne Piggott

Phonology, 2003

... 2 The phenomenon identified in this paper as nasal harmony excludes cases such as those attes... more ... 2 The phenomenon identified in this paper as nasal harmony excludes cases such as those attested in the Bantu languages like Kikongo, Kiyaka and Lamba, where consonants appear to harmonise for nasality across intervening vowels. ...

Folia Phoniatrica Et Logopaedica, 1999

This paper is part of a study of prosodic features of familial language impairment (FLI) in Engli... more This paper is part of a study of prosodic features of familial language impairment (FLI) in English. It reports the results of a set of experiments designed to investigate the factors that play a role in the assignment of stress to words which are longer than two syllables. It appears that stress assignment in FLI is constrained by a restriction limiting the maximal size of the stress domain to a bisyllabic unit, formally defined as the minimal prosodic word. We hypothesize that this restriction is responsible for variable patterns of word truncation, stress levelling and compounding that characterize the production of polysyllabic words.

Journal of Linguistics, 2000

Morphemes are sometimes expressed by elements that are less than full segments, and, in a given l... more Morphemes are sometimes expressed by elements that are less than full segments, and, in a given language, the position of these elements in a word may vary. A recent analysis of these 'mobile morphemes' claims that their distribution is best explained in an ...

... la même manière, un patron harmonique du kikongo est causé par une relation d'identité e... more ... la même manière, un patron harmonique du kikongo est causé par une relation d'identité entre pieds prosodiques adjacents. Cet article prône donc l'existence d'un nouveau type de pied : le pied harmonique Revue / Journal Title. The Canadian journal of linguistics ISSN 0008 ...

Phonology, 1998

... languages limit coda segments to those that can be classified as placeless (eg glottal stop),... more ... languages limit coda segments to those that can be classified as placeless (eg glottal stop), or those bearing a 'default' place specification ... k h hy ... has the feature-geometric properties in (22), where SV encodes the property of sonorancy and voicing as proposed by Rice & Avery ...

Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 1995

A standard assumption in the moraic theory of syllable weight is that a syllable must contain at ... more A standard assumption in the moraic theory of syllable weight is that a syllable must contain at least one mora, which is usually associated with a vowel. This paper presents arguments and evidence against this assumption. The evidence is drawn primarily from the behavior of epenthetic syllables in Mohawk and Iraqi Arabic with brief reference to Selayarese and Yapese. It is demonstrated that weight-sensitive phenomena such as stress assignment, vowel lengthening, and the bimoraicity of the minimal word consistently treat certain epenthetic syllables in these languages as lacking weight. To explain the behavior of epenthetic syllables, the paper proposes a revision to the theory of epenthesis to permit ‘stranded’ or unlicensed consonants to project (or be mapped) to syllables that have no weight. Such syllables may remain without a vocalic nucleus throughout the phonology and as such are interpreted as weightless by various phonological processes.

Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 1992

Nasal harmony patterns differ in terms of the segments that are transparent, opaque or targets. T... more Nasal harmony patterns differ in terms of the segments that are transparent, opaque or targets. Typical analyses attribute the differences to idiosyncratic restrictions on rules. This paper argues for an alternative approach according to which differences follow from the organization of the feature [nasal]. Two options are proposed, yielding two fundamentally different harmony types. In one type, [nasal] is a dependent of the Soft Palate node, and harmony is transmitted by spreading the superordinate node. In the second type, the harmony process spreads the features [nasal], which is organized as a dependent of a node, Spontaneous Voicing, present in sonorants. A salient difference between the two types is the absence of opaque segments in the latter, while in the former, nasal spreading is always arrested by a consonant. The two harmony types really reflect a typological distinction between languages that manifest a nasal-oral contrast within the class of [+consonantal] segments and those in which a similar contrast is restricted either to vowels or to sonorant consonants. The sonorant consonants often include prenasalized stops.

Linguistic Review, 1991

... (6) a. pik [pi:k] 4sand' nen [nern] 'spirif pwil [pwi:l] 'gum' b. kent [k... more ... (6) a. pik [pi:k] 4sand' nen [nern] 'spirif pwil [pwi:l] 'gum' b. kent [kent] 'urine' emp [emp] 'coconut crab' c. mall [mall] Clearing' kull [kull] 'roach' McCarthy attributes the process of vowel lengthening to a requirement that Ponapean nouns must minimally be bimoraic. ...

Lingua, 1997

There is a general consensus in phonology that relations conform to a locality requirement imposi... more There is a general consensus in phonology that relations conform to a locality requirement imposing a strict adjacency condition on related entities. One pattern of nasal harmony adheres to this condition; nasality extends over a sequence of segments that may include vowels, semivowels, liquids, nasals and fricatives, and no segments can be skipped. In another pattern, locality appears to be violated, because obstruents are invariably transparent. This paper proposes a novel solution to the locality problem posed by the latter by advancing a theory in which nasality always spreads locally either at the segmental level or at the level of the heads/nucleus of syllables. The apparent skipping of obstruents arises in the second mode of spreading, a type of vowel harmony. The analysis attributes the obligatory nasalisation of sonorant consonants when harmony is the nucleus-to-nucleus type to an independent principle of Syllable Nasalisation, which is necessarily in effect when Nasal is a syllabic feature.