This dissertation addresses the broad question about how phonology and phonetics are interrelated, specifically how phonetic language changes, which gradually alter the phonetics of speech sounds, affect the phonological system of the language, and vice versa. Some questions I address are: (i) What aspects of speakers' knowledge of their language…

This dissertation investigates the effects of phonological neighborhoods on pronunciation variation in conversational speech. Phonological neighbors are defined as words that are different in one and only one phoneme by addition, deletion and substitution. Phonological neighborhood density refers to the number of neighbors a certain word has. …

This dissertation presents a dialectological study of the city of Erie, Pennsylvania, and the neighboring towns in the boundary area between the North and Midland dialect regions. Erie occupies a unique place in the dialect geography of North America, in that it appears to have switched status from the North to the Midland. Since the dialect…

Variation in verbal morphology is a phenomenon which has been the object of linguistic research for a long time. Two competing sets of predictions have been put forth to account for the distribution of verbal inflections in learner language: The Aspect Hypothesis posits that learners predominantly use inflections to indicate categories of lexical…

In this paper we examine the language situation among the Gypsies of Jordan within the framework of previous theories on language maintenance and shift as proposed by Le Page, Fishman, Dorian and Kelman. The study investigates language and cultural maintenance among the Gypsies of Jordan to permit comparison of the relative influences of various…