Thesiss

This dissertation investigates the spread of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) sound change among Arab American high school students in Dearborn, Michigan. The NCS is a set of vowel changes found in speakers from Chicago, IL, to Buffalo, NY. Using data collected during ethnographi…

This thesis examines an understudied nasalization rule in Hoocąk, an endangered Siouan language, whereby the alveolar flap becomes nasalized after nasal vowels. Impressionistic descriptions suggest that this has developed in two ways over time: (1) the output was [ɾ͂] but is not …

The main goal of this dissertation is to provide a generative account of phonological opacity within a framework built upon direct mapping in the synchronic grammar without abstract intermediate representations, as in standard Optimality Theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993/200…