Tom 62 (2020): Zeszyt 2 (December 2020)

The matter of shadowing natural speech has been discussed in many studies and papers. However, there is very little knowledge of human phonetical convergence to synthesized speech. To find out more about this issue an experiment in the Polish language was conducted. Two types of stimuli were used – natural speech and synthesised speech. Five sets of sentences with various phonetic phenomena in Polish were prepared. A group of twenty persons were recorded which gave the total number of 100 samples for each phenomenon. The summary of results shows convergence in both natural and synthesised speech in set number 1, 2, 4 while in group 3 and 5 the convergence was not observed. The baseline production shown that the great majority of participants prefer ɛn/ɛm version of phonetic feature which was reflected in 83 out of 100 sentences. In the shadowing natural speech participants changed ɛn/ɛm to ɛw/ɛ̃ in 26 cases and in 4 ɛw/ɛ̃ to ɛn/ɛm. When shadowing synthesised speech shift from ɛn/ɛm to ɛw/ɛ̃ in 18 sentences and 4 from ɛw/ɛ̃ to ɛn/ɛm. The intonation convergence was also observed in the perceptual analysis, however the analysis of F0 statistics did not show statistically significant differences.

This study examines the morpho-syntax of labile anticausative structures in Jordanian Arabic (JA). Although the transitive counterpart of anticausatives is marked via morphological affixes that reflect structural and lexical components in Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic, a number of verbs involving causative alternation exhibit identical forms in JA (e.g., ġala [+T] ‘to CAUSE boil something’ vs ġala [–T] ‘to BECOME boil’). Such variation poses challenges for mapping between verb morphology and its lexical semantics. To handle such variation, which is also observed cross-linguistically, we argue in favour of Schäfer (2008; 2012), Schäfer & Vivanco (2015), and Ramchand’s (2008) “causer-less” analysis over Koontz-Garboden’s (2009) “reflexive” analysis. This work further assumes the existence of a Voice phrase lacking a specifier (external argument) and assumes that Voice projection is headed by an implied Voice head (^vcauser) that syntactically assigns the accusative case to its new subject and semantically encodes the internal argument and describes the resultant subevent of the verb. The work also provides an alternative solution for voice projection that lacks an explicit specifier bearing [+agent] or [+causer] feature specification. The work assumes the presence of an inchoative Voice head [^vinch] introducing the Spec Voice Phrase, which encodes an inchoative resultant state of an event achieved over its theme. Contrary to Al-Qadi (2015), the present model assumes that such verbs constitute a middle position between transitive and intransitive verbs in JA but do not constitute a separate class of their own. Evidently, the correct characterization of the anticausative subclass distribution is that it surfaces wherever v is transitive as well as in intransitive volitional contexts (a non-natural class). More intriguingly, the presented material suggests that there is an ongoing process of diachronic change in spoken Arabic varieties (including JA) that amounts to the development and expansion of an inchoative class where no external or internal inchoative detransitivizing morphemes are involved. This topic, which incorporates an intriguing diachronic dimension in addition to the syntactic details, is missing from the generative literature on Arabic morpho-syntax and is potentially of sufficient interest to merit investigation.

The inscription discovered in 1931 on the remains of a cinerary urn near Sedschütz, Upper Silesia, was at first proposed to be runic. Later analysed as a Germanic text written in Roman characters, the long-obscure Iron Age inscription has only recently been republished after being moved from the museum where it was originally conserved. Presumably executed by a member of the Buri, the early Germano-Roman text is only partially preserved and appears to feature key evidence for the early dialectal development of Germanic. Contemporary with the period of the Marcomannic Wars, its single interpretable lexical element seems to contain the earliest evidence for West Germanic rhotacism.

The paper deals with associative plurals in New Indo-Aryan languages, which are derived from the Old Indo- Aryan apara ‘other’. These markers are found in a large number of NIA languages, but in many of these languages they underwent further grammaticalization into other grammatical units, such as honorific particle, standard plural marker, definiteness marker, marker of inalienable possession etc. Among the factors which underlie this grammatical development, contacts with non-Indo-Aryan languages play a significant role.

The paper explores potential gender-linked differences in the use and perception of insulting language among Bosnian university students. The respondents were asked to provide one-word answers to four questions about the worst male-directed and female-directed insults, and about one-word descriptions of a male and female person who they view as the most detestable. The results indicate that the male and female respondents have a similar perception of the worst male-directed (lack of masculinity) and, to a lesser extent, femaledirected insults (sexual looseness). Surprisingly, insults of homosexual nature, as well as those pertaining to being unethical and physically unattractive were rarely mentioned. The results also reveal significant gender -of-insulter differences in the use of offensive words in reference to the most disliked person, as well as the tendency by the respondents of both genders to avoid using those insults that they perceive as the harshest.

The paper as part of a long-running series is devoted to the etymological analysis of a new segment (namely that with initial dental *d-) of the Angas-Sura root stock, a small group of modern languages remotely and ultimately akin to pharaonic Egyptian and the well-known Semitic languages or Twareg in the Sahara etc. Doing so, I wish to continue the noble tradition initiated by J.H. Greenberg (1958), the founding father of modern Afro-Asiatic comparative linguistics (along with I.M. Diakonoff), who was the first scholar ever to have established by Neo-Grammarian the methods regular consonantal correspondences between Angas-Sura and ancient Egyptian in his pioneering (painfully isolated) paper on the ancient trichtomomy of the word-initial labials in both branches. Nowadays our chances in following this path are substantially more favourable being equipped with our gigantic comparative root catalogue system of the Egyptian etymologies ever published (ongoing since 1994) and of the Afro-Asiatic parental lexical stock (ongoing since 1999).