Implicit in all current theories of the syllable is some assumption of the internal configuration. Prevalent among these are the onset-rime (OR) and the moraic (μ) models, both supported by rather different types of evidence. The OR model favors an interpretation where constituency is exhaustive… read more
As an empirical study, linguistic investigations rely heavily on the selection of suitable subject speakers as representatives of a language community, which in turn underline the necessity of determining representativeness. Through explicit description of the parameters that define a target… read more
In the Tianjin dialect, casual utterance of familiar trisyllabic sequences often induces deletion of phonological segments so that for a trisyllabic string, the non-final syllables would merge into a single syllable. This elide-and-merge process interacts with the rich Tianjin tone sandhi system to… read more