Bowern, Claire, David Goldstein, George Walkden, Anne Breitbarth, Chelsea Sanker, Freek Van de Velde, Ranjan Sen and Aditi Lahiri 2023 Diachrony and Diachronica: 40@40Diachronica 40:5, pp. 666–682 | Editorial
Dresher & Lahiri (1991) propose that Old English displays ‘metrical coherence’: different phonological processes are sensitive to the same metrical structure. We consider how English has dealt with challenges to metrical coherence. We show that the resolved moraic trochee, assumed to… read more
Native speakers are often surprised by the way different languages adapt their words; the same phoneme may be borrowed into different languages in different ways. Even related languages need not adapt the same phoneme in an identical fashion. Evidence from a variety of languages suggests that… read more
English makes use of a wide-spread pattern of word class alternation known as ‘zero-derivation.’ This involves pairs of homophonous forms which are semantically related, yet differ in part-of-speech (e.g. a knot vs. to knot). Many theories have been proposed to describe the relationship between… read more
In 1982, Anatoly Liberman spiced up the century-old debate of the development of word accents in North Germanic, by proposing that stød developed first, followed by tonogenesis in Norwegian and Swedish. Liberman, however, did not address the actual mechanisms of stød – or tonogenesis. The present… read more
Many models have been proposed to account for the role that the mental lexicon plays in the initial stages of speech perception. One fundamental disparity between these models is how speech is phonologically represented in the mental lexicon. Theories range from full specification and… read more
How do speakers process phonological opacities resulting from stem allomorphy in regularly inflected word forms? We advocate a model which holds that these stem allomorphs are derived from a single, abstract lexical representation and do not require multiple access routes. Consequently,… read more
