About
Berkeley Papers in Formal Linguistics publishes work in formal linguistics across a range of subdisciplines. The series is edited by Amy Rose Deal and Line Mikkelsen. Papers are published in the form in which they are submitted and are organized into annual volumes. Papers will be made available shortly after submission.
Volume 2, Issue 1, 2019
Articles
Phonological Reconstruction of Proto-Kampa Consonants
This article reconstructs the Proto-Kampa (Arawakan: Peru) consonant inventory using lexical data from Nomatsigenga, Ashéninka, Pajonal Ashéninka, Asháninka, Kakinte, and Matsigenka. Cognate set and correspondence set construction was partly automated by the use of LingPy, Edictor, and Lingrex—computational tools developed by Johann Mattis-List. I agree with Michael (2010) in reconstructing an inventory of /m, n, N, p, b, t, k, g, ts, tʃ, s, ʃ, h, ɾ, j/. Sound changes that affected these Proto-Kampa consonants in the daughter varieties include palatalization, the development of contrastive aspiration in Ashéninka and Pajonal, *Np > m and *Nk > ŋ in Nomatsigenga, lenition and loss of *g, and loss of *h.
Plural Classifier xie and Grammatical Number in Mandarin Chinese
This paper presents an analysis of Mandarin Chinese as having both singular classifiers and a plural classifier, xie. The Num head is the cross-linguistic locus for number marking, hosting both plural suffixes (such as English -s) and classifiers. As Mandarin bare nouns are general number (inclusive plural), singular classifiers create a singular reading while plural classifier xie creates a plural (exclusive plural) reading; thus Mandarin makes a three-way grammatical number distinction.