Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 20, Issue 3, 1996

This paper discusses the phonological properties of words and phrases in two Northern Arawak languages of the Upper Rio Negro, Brazil. These features are h-prosody, vowel harmony triggered by the glottal fricative h, vowel nasalization and vowel diphthongization. A feature that is used to mark a word in one language may mark a phrase in the other. There is a regular interdependence between morphemes and syllables.The most unusual characteristic of the languages is the existence of pausal forms which mark phrase-final and utterance-final boundaries. The phonological character of pause marking devices, viewed cross-linguistically, contradicts a wide-spread assumption about the entirely phonetic realization of pauses.

Grammaticalization processes in East and mainland South East Asian languages show remarkable areal parallels within the domain of the verb and the noun. Since language contact increases processes of reanalysis it supports grammaticalization and its cross-linguistic similarity. Grammaticalization processes are governed by attractor positions (cf. 1.1.3.) and pathways of grammaticalization (cf. 1.1..4.). The former is a good parameter for making areal distinctions, the latter is of areal relevance only within the domain of the verb. Because of attractor positions, grammaticalization processes are not necessarily slow and gradual. The distribution of attractor positions relative to each other is governed by the principles of relevance and generality (Bybee 1985).

The grammaticalization of as from a lexical imperative of Ancient Greek to a particle of Modern Greek follows some well-identified trends in historical linguistics. An adequate description of the change needs to refer simultaneously to semantic, syntactic and phonological parameters, which makes as a typical case of grammaticalization and a clear example of interaction of all such parameters. As, a highly polysemous category in Modern Greek, follows complex paths of development which for their description require also reference to 1) semantic relations such as metaphor and metonymy and 2) the interaction of existing grammatical patterns of the language with the emergent category.

The status of morphology and procedures of morphological production vary in remarkably diverse ways among languages of different typologies. The analysis presented in this study documents pervasive phenomena manifested in the discourse of Ilocano, as a result of the unique highly-prefixing typology of the language, which may contribute to our understanding of the concepts of lexeme, morphological integrity, and affixal boundness. From a thirty-hour corpus of natural interactions among native speakers of Ilocano, certain patterns of language production are introduced that typify the need to understand the synchronic role of morphology in a polysynthetic language and the status that inflectional and/or derivational affixes have in the lexicons of the speakers (Rubino 1994a). This paper will illustrate the intricate workings of the Ilocano language with regard to inter-morphemic pausing, production of affixes without lexical roots, the post-production restructuring of affixation, and the many uses of the versatile empty root kua which is employed by speakers who have uttered the syntactic frame of the word with appropriate affixes, before accessing the lexical root, suggesting that planning and production often take place at the morphemic level. It will then become apparent how the use of discourse data can be utilized to better our understanding of morphology and morphological processes.