Samoan is an ergative-marking, (reportedly) non-tonal Polynesian language in which ergative case is marked segmentally, but absolutive case has been said to be unmarked. This paper shows that in fact, a high edge tone co-occurs with absolutive …
Advances in the syntactic parsing of written language have proceeded apace in the last few decades, but much less progress has been made in the syntactic parsing of spoken language. Here, we address one question important for such progress: how can …
In this paper, we computationally implement and compare grammars of Samoan stress patterns that refer to feet and that refer only to syllables in Karttunen’s finite state formalization of Optimality Theory, and in grammars that directly state …
While it has long been clear that prosody should be part of the grammar influencing the action of the syntactic parser, how to bring prosody into computational models of syntactic parsing has remained unclear. The challenge is that prosodic …
This paper documents and analyses stress and vowel length in Samoan words. The domain of footing, the Prosodic Word, appears to be a root and cohering suffixes; prefixes and most disyllabic suffixes form a separate domain. Vowel sequences that …