This article examines English vowel perception by advanced Polish learners of English in a formal classroom setting (i.e., they learnt English as a foreign language in school while living in Poland). The stimuli included 11 English noncewords in bilabial (/bVb/), alveolar (/dVd/) and velar (/gVg/) contexts. The participants, 35 first-year English majors, were examined during the performance of three tasks with English vowels: a categorial discrimination oddity task, an L1 assimilation task (categorization and goodness rating) and a task involving rating the (dis-)similarities between pairs of English vowels. The results showed a variety of assimilation types according to the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) and the expected performance in a discrimination task. The more difficult it was to discriminate between two given vowels, the more similar these vowels were judged to be. Vowel contrasts involving height distinctions were easier to discriminate than vowel contrasts with tongue advancement distinctions. The results also revealed that the place of articulation of neighboring consonants had little effect on the perceptibility of the tested English vowels, unlike in the case of lower-proficiency learners. Unlike previous results for naïve listeners, the present results for advanced learners showed no adherence to the principles of the Natural Referent Vowel framework. Generally, the perception of English vowels by these Polish advanced learners of English conformed with PAM's predictions, but differed from vowel perception by naïve listeners and lower-proficiency learners.

This paper examines a previously identified but so far imprecisely defined split in the historical phonology of Resígaro (Arawakan). I argue that this development was a simple case of allophonic redistribution or primary split, in which word-final allophones of *a merged with ɯ. However, comparative data offers no evidence for the existence of ɯ before the operation of the split in question. This apparent paradox can be resolved by the plausible hypothesis that ɯ entered the language via the massive influx of morphemes from Bora, an unrelated language of the Bora-Muinane family. Only after that were some contextual allophones of *a merged with ɯ. This is the first solidly justified case of loan phonology in Resígaro and it provides further support to the hypothesis that Bora influence on Resígaro is not a result of the language's obsolescent status.

This article examines the various realizations of the Italian definite article and concludes, against all previous accounts of this phenomenon, that neither the singular nor the plural realizations constitute a case of allomorphy stricto sensu. Significantly extending Larsen's (1998) analysis, the paper argues that all of the realizations of the definite article, including the problematic [i] and [ʎi], share a single underlying representation. It is proposed that the definite article is associated with a template with separate sites for definiteness and φ-features. It is further argued that [ʎ] is not a primitive entity in Italian; rather, it emerges from a very specific configuration in which /i/ and /l/ are conjoined and followed by a second realized vowel /i/. The templatic and segmental decompositions yield a morphologically unified analysis in which all of the realizations of the definite article are based on a single lexical representation followed by the application of regular phonology.

La présente contribution porte sur tourner et virer, deux verbes attributifs (p. ex. elle a viré/tourné folle) qui ne sont pas encore reconnus pleinement par la tradition grammaticale normative ni dans les travaux des linguistes. Elle vise à établir le profil distributionnel / collocationnel de ces deux verbes qui semblent opérer dans le même domaine sémantico-fonctionnel, afin de mettre à nu les subtiles divergences au niveau de leur profil sémantique. Celles-ci sont rattachées à la sémantique de base du verbe lexical, laissant entrevoir dans ces emplois grammaticalisés des effets dus à la « persistance lexicale » (lexical persistence). Afin d'objectiver au maximum les profils distributionnels des deux verbes (et partant leur profil sémantique), les outils statistiques offerts par la méthode collostructionnelle (Stefanowitsch et Gries 2003; Gries et Stefanowitsch 2004) sont mis à profit. En outre, la combinaison de l'approche collocationnelle et de l'analyse morphosyntaxique amène à distinguer l'emploi proprement attributif des deux verbes d'un emploi directionnel abstrait homonymique (l'entreprise a viré solaire), qui est encore proche de la construction prépositionnelle (virer à / tourner à).

In considering the cognitive notion of informativeness, variants of the Spanish first-person singular object a mí ‘to me’, ‘myself’ convey different meanings. These meanings are used to pursue communicative goals in discursive interactions. A qualitative examination of specific examples of first-person singular object a mí variants (omitted, preverbal, and postverbal) as well as a quantitative analysis of these variants across different socio-professional affiliations of speakers was conducted to ascertain how these variants contribute to the construction of communicative styles based on the cognitive dimension of subjectivity. This article demonstrates that these forms and their meanings are unevenly distributed across the socio-professional affiliations of speakers; thus, it may be concluded that variation of first-person singular object a mí shape different communicative styles.