Laura J Downing
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 280722 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Laura J Downing |
| PRENOMES | Laura J |
| SOBRENOME | Downing |
| ASSINATURA | DOWNING L J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5609-4892 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 44 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 93 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 43 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1990 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Testing typologies of laryngeal markedness on African languages
The typological generalizations that emerge from comparing phoneme inventories and phonological processes in as many of the world’s languages as possible are the foundation of theory building in phonetics and phonology. Since one-third of the world’s languages are spoken in Africa, one would expect them to be well-represented in typological surveys of segment types and segment inventories. However, this is not the case. This paper aims to address…
Domains and directionality in Kinande vowel harmony
The ATR vowel harmony patterns observed in Kinande have received persistent attention for their combination of stem control and dominance, as well as less familiar phenomena such as dominance reversal and cross-word harmony. This paper provides a Syntagmatic Correspondence analysis of the Kinande vowel harmony system and demonstrates that it straightforwardly accounts for the intricate interaction of featural, directional and morpho-prosodic doma…
Recursion and the Definition of Universal Prosodic Categories
It is widely agreed that prosodic constituents should mirror syntactic constituents (unless high-ranking prosodic constraints interfere). Because recursion is a feature of syntactic representations, one expects recursion in prosodic representations as well. However, it is of current controversy what kinds of syntactic representation motivate prosodic recursion. In this paper, the use of Phonological Phrase recursion is reviewed in several case st…
Revealing structure
Reviewed by: Revealing structure: Papers in honor of Larry M. Hyman ed. by Eugene Buckley Laura J. Downing Revealing structure: Papers in honor of Larry M. Hyman. Ed. by Eugene Buckley, Thera Crane, and Jeff Good. (CSLI lecture notes 219.) Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 2018. Pp. ix, 292. ISBN 9781684000296. $30. Revealing structure mostly consists of papers presented to Larry Hyman in honor of his sixty-fifth birthday. The introduction to this…
Re-placing PStem in the prosodic hierarchy
A persistent issue for the Prosodic Hierarchy is what repertory of prosodic constituents is needed to define the commonly recurring domains for phonological processes. Even though there is a long tradition of work arguing in favor of up to three subphrasal constituents (Composite Group (CG), PWord and PStem), a body of recent work has argued in favor of a more parsimonious view of the repertory , making the strong claim that, at the subphrasal le…
(In)direct Reference in the Phonology-Syntax Interface under Phase Theory
Although in many interface theories, the domains of phrasal phonological processes are defined in terms of prosodic constituents, D’Alessandro and Scheer (2015) argue that their proposed modification of phase theory, Modular PIC, renders prosodic constituents superfluous. Phrasal phonological domains can instead be defined directly in the syntax. In this response, we argue that Modular PIC does not provide a convincing new approach to the syntax-…
Intonation in African Tone Languages
This volume brings together two under-investigated areas of intonation typology. While tone languages make up to 70 percent of the world?s languages, only few have been explored for intonation. And even though one third of the world?s languages are spoken in Africa, and most sub-Saharan languages are tone languages, recent collections on tone and intonation typology have almost entirely ignored African languages. This book aims to fill this gap
Phasal Syntax = Cyclic Phonology
This paper addresses three central questions in the phonology-syntax interface: What does phonology know about syntax? Does phrasal phonology "know" about syntax directly or indirectly (i.e., mediated by prosodic constituents such as Intonation Phrase)? When does the phonology-syntax interaction take place? Most current phase-based theories of the interface assume a strict cyclic model of derivation, in which the output of each spell-out domain d…
NT revisited again
Phonological alternations in homorganic nasal–stop sequences provide a continuing topic of investigation for phonologists and phoneticians alike. Surveys like Herbert (1986), Rosenthal (1989), Steriade (1993) and Hyman (2001) demonstrate that cross-linguistically the most common process is for the postnasal stop to become voiced, as captured by Pater’s (1999) markedness constraint *NT. However, as observed since Hyman (2001), *NT alone does not a…
What is Reduplication? Typology and Analysis Part 2/2
Reduplication has played a central role in the development of phonological theories for 30 years. The introduction of the classical optimality theory (OT) in the 1990s sparked intensive research into the typology and analysis of reduplicative patterns, as reduplication was a key testing area both for OT and for theories critical of OT. Now, after some 20 years of research within the OT model, it is appropriate to assess the leading ideas on redup…
What is Reduplication? Typology and Analysis Part 1/2
Reduplication has played a central role in the development of phonological theories for 30 years. The introduction of Classical Optimality Theory (OT) in the 1990s sparked intensive research into the typology and analysis of reduplicative patterns, as reduplication was a key testing area both for OT and for theories critical of OT. Now, after some 20 years of research within the OT model, it is appropriate to assess the leading ideas on reduplica…
Melodic verb tone patterns in Jita
Cet article illustre les schèmes tonals mélodiques et non mélodiques du verbe en jita. On trouve plusieurs schèmes mélodiques : à pénultième Haute, à finale Haute et à initiale Haute/ finale Haute, ainsi qu’un schème «chaotique » combinant les précédents au sein d’une seule inflexion en fonction de la longueur du thème verbal et de son ton lexical. Les schèmes tonals verbaux que présente le jita sont pratiquement identiques à ceux du ruri proche.…
Indefinite subjects in Durban Zulu
It has long been observed that subjects cross-linguistically have topic properties: they are typically definite, referential and/or generic (Givón 1976). Bantu languages are said to illustrate this generalization: preverbal position for NPs is equated with both subject and topic status and postverbal position with focus (and non-subject). However, there is a growing body of work showing that preverbal subjects are not necessarily syntactically or…
The focus prosody of Chichewa and the Stress-Focus constraint
Challenges of Cushitic reduplication for Generalized Template Theory
In this paper we investigate two typical Cushitic reduplication patterns, CVC- initial and -C final. They were chosen, as they would appear to be especially problematic for the generalized template theory of reduplication developed within OT: neither CVC- nor -C is an unmarked syllable or unmarked metrical foot. The challenge for any analysis is to motivate why these shapes are unmarked. We propose that CVC- is a minimal root, and variations in t…
Questions in Bantu languages
The papers in this volume were originally presented at the Workshop on Bantu Wh-questions, held at the Institut des Sciences de l’Homme, Université Lyon 2, on 25-26 March 2011, which was organized by the French-German cooperative project on the Phonology/Syntax Interface in Bantu Languages (BANTU PSYN). This project, which is funded by the ANR and the DFG, comprises three research teams, based in Berlin, Paris and Lyon. The Berlin team, at the ZA…
Wh-questions in Chewa and Tumbuka
This paper presents a preliminary survey of the positions and prosodies associated with Wh-questions in two Bantu languages spoken in Malawi. The paper shows that the two languages are similar in requiring focused subjects to be clefted. Both also require 'which' questions and 'because of what' questions to be clefted or fronted. However, for other non-subjects Tumbuka rather uniformly imposes an IAV (immediately after the verb) requirement, whil…
Un-Wrap-ing prosodic phrasing in Chichewa
The prosody of 'dislocation' in selected Bantu languages
Opacity is a matter of representation
As work like McCarthy (2002: 128) notes, pre-Optimality Theory (OT) phonology was primarily concerned with representations and theories of subsegmental structure. In contrast, the role of representations and choice of structural models has received little attention in OT. Some central representational issues of the pre-OT era have, in fact, become moot in OT (McCarthy 2002: 128). Further, as work like Baković (2007) notes, even for assimilatory p…
Locative relatives in Durban Zulu
This paper examines locative relatives in Durban Zulu. We show that locative relatives differ from nominal relatives crucially in prosodic phrasing as well as in resumptive pronoun marking. We propose that the best way to account for locative relatives in Zulu is to resort to the old style adjunction analysis of relative clauses, with an empty operator. The system we propose assumes that such an adjunction analysis co-exists with a head-raising a…
Prosody of relative clauses in Chewa
This paper tests three current theories of the phonology-syntax interface – Truckenbrodt (1995), Pak (2008) and Cheng & Downing (2007, 2009) – on the prosody of relative clauses in Chewa. Relative clauses, especially restrictive relative clauses, provide an ideal data set for comparing these theories, as they each make distinct predictions about the optimal phrasing. We show that the asymmetrical phase-edge based approach developed to account for…
Papers from the workshop on Bantu relative clauses
All of the papers in the volume except one (Kaji) take up some aspect of relative clause construction in some Bantu language. Kaji's paper aims to account for how Tooro (J12; western Uganda) lost phonological tone through a comparative study of the tone systems of other western Uganda Bantu languages. The other papers examine a range of ways of forming relative clauses, often including non-restrictive relatives and clefts, in a wide range of lang…
Where's the topic in Zulu
This article provides a detailed investigation of the prosody and syntax of dislocation in Durban Zulu, an Nguni Bantu language spoken in South Africa. With focus elements obligatorily appearing in an immediately after the verb position, non-focused elements within a verb phrase have to be right- or left-dislocated. We discuss the asymmetries between right- and left-dislocation, showing that only left-dislocated elements can be topics. We argue t…
On pitch lowering not linked to voicing
Phasal Syntax = Cyclic Phonology
This paper addresses three central questions in the phonology-syntax interface: What does phonology know about syntax? Does phrasal phonology "know" about syntax directly or indirectly (i.e., mediated by prosodic constituents such as Intonation Phrase)? When does the phonology-syntax interaction take place? Most current phase-based theories of the interface assume a strict cyclic model of derivation, in which the output of each spell-out domain d…
Theoretical Aspects of Bantu Tone
1. Semantic/pragmatic conditions on the tonology of the Kongo noun phrase: a diachronic hypothesis Jean Alain Blanchon 2. Optimality domains theory and Bantu tonology: a case study from Isixhosa and Shingazidja Farida Cassimjee and Charles W. Kisseberth 3. Expansion and retraction of high tone domains in Setswana Denis Creissels 4. Tonal domains and depressor consonants in Ikalanga Larry M. Hyman and Joyce T. Mathangwane 5. AUX in Bantu morpholog…
On the Prosodic Misalignment of Onsetless Syllables
The prosody of 'dislocation' in selected Bantu languages
Re-placing PStem in the prosodic hierarchy
A persistent issue for the Prosodic Hierarchy is what repertory of prosodic constituents is needed to define the commonly recurring domains for phonological processes. Even though there is a long tradition of work arguing in favor of up to three subphrasal constituents (Composite Group (CG), PWord and PStem), a body of recent work has argued in favor of a more parsimonious view of the repertory , making the strong claim that, at the subphrasal le…
(In)direct Reference in the Phonology-Syntax Interface under Phase Theory
Although in many interface theories, the domains of phrasal phonological processes are defined in terms of prosodic constituents, D’Alessandro and Scheer (2015) argue that their proposed modification of phase theory, Modular PIC, renders prosodic constituents superfluous. Phrasal phonological domains can instead be defined directly in the syntax. In this response, we argue that Modular PIC does not provide a convincing new approach to the syntax-…
What is Reduplication? Typology and Analysis Part 2/2
Reduplication has played a central role in the development of phonological theories for 30 years. The introduction of the classical optimality theory (OT) in the 1990s sparked intensive research into the typology and analysis of reduplicative patterns, as reduplication was a key testing area both for OT and for theories critical of OT. Now, after some 20 years of research within the OT model, it is appropriate to assess the leading ideas on redup…
Local and metrical tone shift in Nguni
In this paper I argue that the Nguni languages have both a metrical tone shift rule and a non-metrical (local) tone shift rule which precedes and feeds assignment of metrical prominence (accent). As Goldsmith, Peterson, and Drogo [1986] and Peterson [1989b] have argued, a metrical tone shift rule best accounts for the fact that the rightmost high tone in most words surfaces on the antepenult. Not all high tones shift to the antepenult, however; i…
Recursion and the Definition of Universal Prosodic Categories
It is widely agreed that prosodic constituents should mirror syntactic constituents (unless high-ranking prosodic constraints interfere). Because recursion is a feature of syntactic representations, one expects recursion in prosodic representations as well. However, it is of current controversy what kinds of syntactic representation motivate prosodic recursion. In this paper, the use of Phonological Phrase recursion is reviewed in several case st…
What is Reduplication? Typology and Analysis Part 1/2
Reduplication has played a central role in the development of phonological theories for 30 years. The introduction of Classical Optimality Theory (OT) in the 1990s sparked intensive research into the typology and analysis of reduplicative patterns, as reduplication was a key testing area both for OT and for theories critical of OT. Now, after some 20 years of research within the OT model, it is appropriate to assess the leading ideas on reduplica…
Papers from the workshop on Bantu relative clauses
All of the papers in the volume except one (Kaji) take up some aspect of relative clause construction in some Bantu language. Kaji's paper aims to account for how Tooro (J12; western Uganda) lost phonological tone through a comparative study of the tone systems of other western Uganda Bantu languages. The other papers examine a range of ways of forming relative clauses, often including non-restrictive relatives and clefts, in a wide range of lang…
Un-Wrap-ing prosodic phrasing in Chichewa
Ungeneralizable minimality in Ndebele
A body of work in Prosodic Morphology clearly establishes the importance of prosodic constituents like the foot as templates conditioning morpheme size. A striking finding of this research is that morphological footing is independent of metrical footing in many languages, as the footing required for particular morphological processes is often not identical to that required for phonological processes like stress assignment. However, recent OT rese…
NT revisited again
Phonological alternations in homorganic nasal–stop sequences provide a continuing topic of investigation for phonologists and phoneticians alike. Surveys like Herbert (1986), Rosenthal (1989), Steriade (1993) and Hyman (2001) demonstrate that cross-linguistically the most common process is for the postnasal stop to become voiced, as captured by Pater’s (1999) markedness constraint *NT. However, as observed since Hyman (2001), *NT alone does not a…
Introduction
Local and metrical tone shift in Nguni
In this paper I argue that the Nguni languages have both a metrical tone shift rule and a non-metrical (local) tone shift rule which precedes and feeds assignment of metrical prominence (accent). As Goldsmith, Peterson, and Drogo [1986] and Peterson [1989b] have argued, a metrical tone shift rule best accounts for the fact that the rightmost high tone in most words surfaces on the antepenult. Not all high tones shift to the antepenult, however; i…
Jita Glide Epenthesis and the Maximality Principle
Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on African Language Structures (1991), pp. 74-86
David Odden (1996). The phonology and morphology of Kimatuumbi. ( The phonology of the world's languages .) Oxford
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Morphological Correspondence in Kinande Reduplication
Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Structure (1997)
On the Prosodic Misalignment of Onsetless Syllables
Theoretical Aspects of Bantu Tone
1. Semantic/pragmatic conditions on the tonology of the Kongo noun phrase: a diachronic hypothesis Jean Alain Blanchon 2. Optimality domains theory and Bantu tonology: a case study from Isixhosa and Shingazidja Farida Cassimjee and Charles W. Kisseberth 3. Expansion and retraction of high tone domains in Setswana Denis Creissels 4. Tonal domains and depressor consonants in Ikalanga Larry M. Hyman and Joyce T. Mathangwane 5. AUX in Bantu morpholog…
Morphological and prosodic constraints on Kinande verbal reduplication
As Mutaka & Hyman (1990) and Mutaka (1994) show, the Kinande reduplication patterns in (1) present several analytical challenges (eri- is the infinitive prefix; the reduplicant is underlined)
Satisfying minimality in Ndebele
In this paper, I discuss four different verb forms in Ndebele (a Nguni Bantu language spoken mainly in Zimbabwe) - the imperative, reduplicated, future and participial. I show that while all four are subject to minimality restrictions, minimality is satisfied differently in each of these morphological contexts. To account for this, I argue that in Ndebele (as in other Bantu languages) Word and RED are not the only constituents which must satisfy …
Eric Raimy (2000). The phonology and morphology of reduplication. (Studies in Generative Grammar 52.) Berlin
The theory of reduplication developed in this book distinguishes itself from most recent work in reduplication in important ways. First of all, it adopts the Distributed Morphology framework (Halle & Marantz 1993, 1994, Noyer 1997) and a derivational, rule-based approach to reduplication (and to phonology in general). It explicitly argues against parallel, surface-based models of prosodic morphology, like Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1993…
Voiceless Tone Depressors in Nambya and Botswana Kalang'a
No abstract available
Ungeneralizable minimality in Ndebele
A body of work in Prosodic Morphology clearly establishes the importance of prosodic constituents like the foot as templates conditioning morpheme size. A striking finding of this research is that morphological footing is independent of metrical footing in many languages, as the footing required for particular morphological processes is often not identical to that required for phonological processes like stress assignment. However, recent OT rese…
Compounding and tonal non-transfer in Bantu languages
In this paper I discuss a source of reduplicative (non-)correspondence common to Bantu tone languages which has not received attention in the formal literature. In many Bantu languages, the entire RED +Base complex forms a single domain for realisation of the Base stem tone, leading to the occurrence of non-corresponding marked tone in both the RED and the Base. I propose that this pattern of tone realisation in reduplicated forms falls out if th…
What African languages tell us about accent typology
The goal of this paper is to survey the accent systems of the indigenous languages of Africa. Although roughly one third of the world’s languages are spoken in Africa, this continent has tended to be underrepresented in earlier stress and accent typology surveys, like Hyman (1977). This one aims to fill that gap. Two main contributions to the typology of accent are made by this study of African languages. First, it confirms Hyman's (1977) earlier…
Prosody and information structure in Chichewa
This paper presents preliminary results of a phonetic and phonological study of the Ntcheu dialect of Chichewa spoken by Al Mtenje (one of the co-authors). This study confirms Kanerva's (1990) work on Nkhotakota Chichewa showing that phonological re-phrasing is the primary cue to information structure in this language. It expands on Kanerva's work in several ways. First, we show that focus phrasing has intonational correlates, namely, the manipul…
Papers in Bantu grammar and description
The collection of papers in this volume presents results of a collaborative project between the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, the Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung (ZAS) in Berlin, and the University of Leiden. All three institutions have a strong interest in the linguistics of Bantu languages, and in 2003 decided to set up a network to compare results and to provide a platfo…
Prosody and syntax of focus in Chitumbuka
This paper presents a sketch of the prosodic, syntactic and morphological means of expressing focus in Chitumbuka, an underdescribed Bantu language of Malawi. The chief prosodic correlate of focus is boundary narrowing – rephrasing conditioned by focus – which is used not only to signal in situ focus but also in syntactic and morphological focus constructions. Of theoretical importance is the fact that rephrasing does not lend culminative promine…
Explaining the role of the morphological continuum in Bantu spirantisation
Focus and prominence in Chichewa, Chitumbuka and Durban Zulu
Much work on the interaction of prosody and focus assumes that, crosslinguistically, there is a necessary correlation between the position of main sentence stress (or accent) and focus, and that an intonational pitch change on the focused element is a primary correlate of focus. In this paper, I discuss primary data from three Bantu languages – Chichewa, Durban Zulu and Chitumbuka – and show that in all three languages phonological re-phrasing, n…
Where's the topic in Zulu
This article provides a detailed investigation of the prosody and syntax of dislocation in Durban Zulu, an Nguni Bantu language spoken in South Africa. With focus elements obligatorily appearing in an immediately after the verb position, non-focused elements within a verb phrase have to be right- or left-dislocated. We discuss the asymmetries between right- and left-dislocation, showing that only left-dislocated elements can be topics. We argue t…
On pitch lowering not linked to voicing
Introduction
Opacity is a matter of representation
As work like McCarthy (2002: 128) notes, pre-Optimality Theory (OT) phonology was primarily concerned with representations and theories of subsegmental structure. In contrast, the role of representations and choice of structural models has received little attention in OT. Some central representational issues of the pre-OT era have, in fact, become moot in OT (McCarthy 2002: 128). Further, as work like Baković (2007) notes, even for assimilatory p…
Locative relatives in Durban Zulu
This paper examines locative relatives in Durban Zulu. We show that locative relatives differ from nominal relatives crucially in prosodic phrasing as well as in resumptive pronoun marking. We propose that the best way to account for locative relatives in Zulu is to resort to the old style adjunction analysis of relative clauses, with an empty operator. The system we propose assumes that such an adjunction analysis co-exists with a head-raising a…
Prosody of relative clauses in Chewa
This paper tests three current theories of the phonology-syntax interface – Truckenbrodt (1995), Pak (2008) and Cheng & Downing (2007, 2009) – on the prosody of relative clauses in Chewa. Relative clauses, especially restrictive relative clauses, provide an ideal data set for comparing these theories, as they each make distinct predictions about the optimal phrasing. We show that the asymmetrical phase-edge based approach developed to account for…
Papers from the workshop on Bantu relative clauses
All of the papers in the volume except one (Kaji) take up some aspect of relative clause construction in some Bantu language. Kaji's paper aims to account for how Tooro (J12; western Uganda) lost phonological tone through a comparative study of the tone systems of other western Uganda Bantu languages. The other papers examine a range of ways of forming relative clauses, often including non-restrictive relatives and clefts, in a wide range of lang…
Linguistics (40 obras) · Philosophy (39 obras) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (38 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (33 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (28 obras) · Computer Science (26 obras) · Bantu languages (15 obras) · Psychology (13 obras) · Phonology (11 obras) · History (10 obras)