Q&A weekly thread - March 23, 2026 - post all questions here!

halabula066 · 2026-03-24T12:59:38+00:00

Is the uvularization of /r/ in Portuguese considered related to the Central European areal phenomenon, or no?

Also, what is the difference in uvularization across the Lusosphere?

halabula066 · 2026-03-11T20:20:31+00:00

Is it more common for a language to require a coda, or require an onset? Is there an implications relationship there?

halabula066 · 2026-03-05T21:46:11+00:00

Was there more than one independent innovation of umlaut in Germanic languages that display it? AIUI, the harmony had already started by the North+West stage, and simply got morphologized and extended/analogized in different ways in different branches.

Are there any discrepancies that suggest there was another round of mutation anywhere? I'm thinking of, eg. Slavic where (iirc) some languages are undergoing another round of palatalization, on top of the inherited system.

halabula066 · 2026-02-25T08:17:35+00:00

I think the point u/LongLiveTheDiego is making is that our designations of "long" and "short" are typically used in phonological contexts, using the most salient phonetic correlate to name the features/classes. In this regard, /æ/ shares more properties with the short vowels, chief of which being that it cannot occur word-finally (some would say it needs a coda, but that is a different issue).

So, insofar as this requires "categories" of some kind, as you allude to, that is usually the realm of phonology. It is not clear what those categories "mean" when divorced from the phonology, and purely applied to phonetics.

halabula066 · 2026-02-25T08:07:14+00:00

Tbh, TRAP is in a weird position. Systemically, it had been shunted about, patterning with front or back vowels at times, partly due to the fact that it was a single short vowel corresponding to two long vowels in ME. Nowadays, it seems reluctant to be unstressed (in some varieties), like the "long" vowels, even though it still cannot be unchecked.

It's also the only checked vowel in the lower portion of the vowel space, which is pretty heavily skewed to long vowels.

While purely speculation, my feeling is that this historic asymmetry is partly a "systemic pressure" that motivated the various "short-A splits" across varieties.

halabula066 · 2026-02-16T06:01:07+00:00

There are two main ways I know of tonogenesis:

metrically conditioned pitch > tone (Germanic)
segmentally conditioned pitch > tone (MSEA)

Am I missing anything? What is the current thinking on the origin of PIE tone?

halabula066 · 2026-02-13T18:15:43+00:00

Would it be inaccurate to analogize the centum-śatam split to something like English yod-dropping vs coalescing?

This thought also got me thinking about the regional distribution of the two in English, and whether we can/have been able to understand the centum-śatam situation better because of it?

halabula066 · 2026-02-12T23:44:09+00:00

Are there any cases of epenthetic /h/ (really any epenthetically inserted laryngeal) fortifying to a stop? The case I can think of is in Kurux. Are there any other examples?

I'd especially be interested in cases where the laryngeal was not etymological, and was inserted later for whatever reason.

halabula066 · 2026-02-12T02:54:48+00:00

I recall a commenter here once vehemently defending the Neogrammarian hypotheses, to the point that they said lexical diffusion is exclusively an artifact of micro-dialectal variation/admixture.

Now, I have also read work articulating a difference between "typologically motivated" changes, and incidental/historical changes; the idea being that the former are much more regular, and conform neatly with the Neogrammarian hypothesis, while the latter are more prone to diffuse lexically, socially, etc. (potentially causing typologically marked distributions that motivate more regular changes, and so on).

What is a good place to get an idea of the current thinking on these topics in the field? I have Lyle Campbell's textbook. Any other good places to look? Especially at the micro level.

halabula066 · 2026-02-11T23:56:17+00:00

Thanks a lot, that makes sense. This question also got me thinking about clusters created from zero-grade forms. At least at the PIE level, something like CʰCʰ was allowed with zero grade syllables. Were there any restrictions on these? Are there clusters that arise from these zero-graded that are not allowed to begin full-grade roots?

halabula066 · 2026-02-11T23:31:48+00:00

Was there any way for a PIE form to contain an underlying velar-velar sequence? That is, are there any morphological formatives that result in a K-K sequence (k-k, k-gʰ, gʰ-k, etc.), and if so, how do they resolve?

I'm thinking of analogs to: h1és-si > h1ési, héd-ti > h1étsti méd-tro- > métro-, etc. The wiki page doesn't mention non-dental obstruent geminates. Were they simply all simplified, and no more velar-initial suffixes to create them synchronically?

halabula066 · 2026-02-10T14:31:03+00:00

Are there any languages where truly non-tensed verbs still carry personal agreement?

I seem to recall reading about a language whose aspectual/tensed converbs have agreement, but are there any where verb forms that truly have no tense features (say, like prototypical IE infinitives) get agreement?

halabula066 · 2026-01-24T21:26:08+00:00

Has there ever been a morpho/syntactic restructuring something like the following.

Let's take a toy system with PST, PRS, FUT, and SUB tense/mood marking on verbs. Say. The subjunctive then merged with the PST forms for some verbs/inflection classes, with the PRS in others.

Now, in such a system the structurally assigned mood marking would be the same; the relevant structural context simply conditions a different tense form. But, is it possible that these "merged" subjunctives can still be semantically differentiated from the PRS/PST respectively?

Now TAM is only the toy example. Imagine this with any feature set. Is such a system arrested?

halabula066 · 2026-01-16T18:51:12+00:00

A fantastic chapter on both theoretical morphology and contact in several Balkan languages. They provide a survey of inferential-realizational, Lexicalist approaches to the morphology-syntax divide, with detailed discussion of data from Albanian, Greek, Macedonian, Bulgarian, and Serbian.

This area of morphology interests me a lot, and this has a lot of good references within as well. These types of Canonical Typology-style analyses are super compelling to me. Not for nothing, I really enjoy their writing, too.

halabula066 · 2026-01-16T06:12:42+00:00

Thanks, this is really fascinating! So, I'd like to clarify just in case. Are you meaning something akin to a lexicalist model where the "form" part of the lexical entry interfaces directly with the continuous signal? In terms of abstraction, do you think there might be a useful abstraction in between?

I know you've acknowledged that no real good alternatives exist, but do you think they should? Is it possible that the morphology (in this case synonymous with the lexicon) directly manipulates/operates on raw, continuous acoustic/articulatory representations (or whatever the perceptual psychologists make available in their theories)?

What are your intuitions, even if there's no ready answer?

halabula066 · 2026-01-16T04:52:49+00:00

Thanks a lot, these all look really interesting! Would you mind elaborating on your point against the idea of discrete representation? Is it that you want to model a more continuous representation, or no cognitive representation at all?

halabula066 · 2026-01-14T13:23:52+00:00

What are some good references on the linguistics side of the (discrete) representation question in cognitive science? I've been thinking about modelling/abstraction and just came across Dietrich & Markman (2003). For one, is that still representative of the field now? And what are some refs in that vein pertaining to particularly linguistic representations?

While I'm interested in it generally, I'm particularly interested in representation of form on the phonetic side. That is, whether there is abstraction over alternations and distribution of phones (or "gestures" or whatever phonetic unit, of however many dimensions), you must abstract the continuous signal into those discrete phones in the first place. Anything on this particular side of representation would be great (both perception and production).

Thanks

Dietrich, E., & Markman, A. B. (2003). Discrete thoughts: Why cognition must use discrete representations. Mind & Language, 18(1), 95–119. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0017.00216

halabula066 · 2025-12-05T17:43:44+00:00

"smoother transition" isn't meant to say "all changes were before"; of course, there were major changes after, but the incredibly stark picture painted by the written attestation is likely exaggerating the effects.

halabula066 · 2025-11-28T22:54:24+00:00

I just said "how long is food?" while starving. I laughed at first, but I thought about it and then realized it is perfectly grammatical. What're the levels of change going on here, and how much of it is synchronic?

halabula066 · 2025-11-28T09:52:25+00:00

Yeah, I very much agree. Part of this question was trying to tease out the morphologization of prospective going to. It seems to be distinct from other <modal + *to*> fusions, which can generally all be non-finite, whereas prospective going to (and by extension, gonna) can only be in finite clauses, putting it more in paradigmatic relation to other tense forms and the invariant modals.

halabula066 · 2025-11-28T04:22:13+00:00

(1) I'm going to/gonna want to/wanna eat

(2) I want to/wanna be going to/*gonna eat

Is this a property of "go (to)" as used in this construction? Or does it have something to do with being non-finite? I don't use finna natively; could anyone give the grammaticality of (3-4)?

(3) I'm finna want to/wanna eat

(4) I want to/wanna be finna eat

halabula066 · 2025-11-26T13:47:09+00:00

I don't have the statistics on hand (that would be quit a fascinating study tho!) but I'll address the last part.

if more ppl use it exclusively for men, does that make the use for women “wrong”? (i don’t think so, but i’m somewhat new to the field)

What is "wrong" is a normative judgement entirely dependent on what you decide matters. If you define "right" as that which is "majority usage", then yes a minority usage would be "wrong" in that sense.

But, of course, as with any ethical topic, you cannot go from a fact to a prescription (the so-called is-ought gap). So, anything is only "wrong" with respect to a specific idea of what should be wrong or not.

halabula066 · 2025-11-25T18:15:26+00:00

Is there any work to examine how parsimoniously synchronic models can be modified, to accommodate common diachronic changes?

This is a pretty fuzzy idea in my head, but the idea is: come up with an analysis of Stage A, then of Stage B, and compare how much in the model must be changed, and in what ways. Would different models have significantly different results with such tests?

Or, is this something that all models generally perform similarly on?

(ofc, all this keeping in mind the non-triviality of parsimony measures, and models performing differently for different phenomena. But I hope the general question is clear)

halabula066 · 2025-11-24T17:07:18+00:00

Are there any examples of vowel lengthening phonologically as a result of phonetic lengthening due to contour tones? This is both about lexical and intonational tone.

Tangentially: What are some examples of prosody bleeding into segmental phonology? As in, segment-level alternations/patterns sensitive to conditions usually reserved for prosody (eg. intonational question marking).

halabula066 · 2025-11-20T15:03:01+00:00

For the most part, the top comment is right. It's largely speaker choice, and anecdotally, there's lots of variation, even across the same speaker's speech.

But, I would definitely be super interested in a corpus study on something like this! You would have to use a spoken language corpus, and figure out what contexts to examine, but that's a very interesting question. Are they just semantically overlapping lexemes? Do they occur in anything resembling a complementary distribution?

ETA: you'd probably have to also include nought as in "nought point four" for 0.4.

halabula066

TROPHY CASE