Volume 05, Spring 1979

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Browsing Volume 05, Spring 1979 by Subject "Phonology"

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    Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 5, Spring 1979
    (University of Calgary, 1979-05) O'Grady, William D.
    This issue is the fifth in the series of working papers published by LOGOS, the Student Linguistics Society at the University of Calgary. The series provides a vehicle for faculty members and students to publish current research. These papers represent research in progress and are not to be considered final statements by the authors. The appearance of these articles in the current issue does not preclude their publication in altered form elsewhere.
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    Causes of rapid phonological change: the case of Atsina and its relatives
    (University of Calgary, 1979-05) Pentland, David H
    The cause of change has always been one of the great unanswered questions of linguistics. It is easy enough to describe the effects of a particular change, but the theories that have been advanced to account for the change's arising in the first place range from the laughable to the merely inadequate. Istvan Fodor (1965) suggests a distinction between internal and external factors. Internal causes of change are the "inherent laws" of a language which cause it to change in a particular way. Fodor observes (15) that the nature of such laws has not been elucidated; nor can it be -- the question is circular: Language X has changed in a certain manner because it was the inherent tendency of that language to do so. Among the external factors examined by Fodor are the effects of history, culture, society, geography, neighbouring peoples, and the national character. Some of these are undoubtedly major conditioners of phonological and other linguistic change, but others are merely coincidental and unrelated to linguistic developments.
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    Loss and restoration of word final vowels in Spanish
    (University of Calgary, 1979-05) Anderson, James M
    The process of apocope in Medieval Spanish offers a glimpse into the interaction of structural and sociological constraints on linguistic behavior. Of the word final unstressed vowels /e/, /o/ and /a/, the twelfth and thirteenth century Spanish /e/, and less often /o/ were effaced exposing new consonants and consonant clusters. Written documentation of the period clearly indicates the loss of the vowel in environments where Modern Spanish has sustained the loss and in others where it has not, cf. Latin panem > Old Spanish pan, Modern Spanish pan. and Latin noctem > Old Spanish noch (in texts), Modern Spanish noche. By the fifteenth century, apocoped vowels were restored except after dental consonants, i.e., /l, r, s, n, ć (>θ), d/. The loss and subsequent restoration of these vowels appears to reflect syntagmatic, sociological and paradigmatic aspects of language function. To what extent can these factors be isolated, and their relative influence examined?