Emphasizing on the key role of polysemy in forming the lexicon is the main goal to be achieved in this dissertation. The paper suggests a qualitative evaluation of polysemy in comparing it with... Show moreEmphasizing on the key role of polysemy in forming the lexicon is the main goal to be achieved in this dissertation. The paper suggests a qualitative evaluation of polysemy in comparing it with other relations that form the lexicon. The research confirms that the polysemic links must not be modeled independently from derivation or conversion. This evaluation leads us to reveal that the boundary between polysemy and conversion is porous. The properties of analogy has been used to compare the relations. They are the links that connect lexis which form the objects of a comparison. Wolof, an Atlantic language in West-Africa, is studied. This language provides a fertile breeding ground for the explorations. A large scale of different morphological processes form the lexicon (like suffix derivation, derivations from consonant alternation and conversion by changes in nominal class morphemes). The descriptive contribution of this research is to explore the semantic fields of artifacts and emotions in Wolof lexicon. The methodology applied here is to describe both the meanings of the lexical units and the semantic links by which they are connected by a unique metalanguage. That unique metalanguage is called the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), which is applied here to Wolof. Show less
The Italian ‘mobile diphthongs’ sheds light on the complexity of one of the salient analogical changes that occurred in the Italian language, viz. the elimination of the alternation between the... Show moreThe Italian ‘mobile diphthongs’ sheds light on the complexity of one of the salient analogical changes that occurred in the Italian language, viz. the elimination of the alternation between the stressed diphthongs [jE] and [wO] and the unstressed monophthongs [e] and [o], respectively, within a limited group of inflectional and derivational paradigms. Historically, the monophthong–diphthong alternation was the consequence of a pan-Romance diphthongization process that affected the Late Latin low mid vowels in stressed positions. The relatively recent levelling of this alternation has led to a great deal of variation: in some cases the alternations are maintained while in others they have been eliminated. The first aim of the present study was to scrutinize durational aspects of Italian diphthongs and monophthongs in general. The second aim was to examine to what extent the variation caused by analogical levelling of the monophthong–diphthong alternation, attested in written sources, also occurs in the spoken language. To investigate these issues, a series of production experiments was carried out with native speakers of Italian. The final aim was to provide a coherent phonological treatment of the insights provided by the experiments within the framework of Optimality Theory.The book is intended as a contribution to experimental phonetics and phonology. It introduces an exciting tool for language-variation research, the speech-shadowing technique, and discusses recent phonological approaches to phenomena such as glide formation, analogy and paradigm uniformity. Therefore, this study is of interest to both phoneticians and phonologists, as well as to linguists with a special interest in Italian. Show less
