Henry Churchyard's linguistics page

Major interests: phonology, metrical phonology, historical phonology, historical linguistics, Semitic historical linguistics, Hebrew, feature theory, nature of phonological representations, writing systems / orthographies and their phonological interpretation.

Serious Stuff

Dissertation

My dissertation Topics in Tiberian Biblical Hebrew Metrical Phonology and Prosodics (University of Texas, May 1999) is available on-line in various formats:

• First, a short plain-text abstract of the dissertation is available. Here's a brief summary of the table of contents:
  • Chapter 1. Syllabification, Stress, and Vowel Reduction in Hebrew
    • §1.1-1.2. Syllabification and Main Stress
    • §1.3. Tiberian Biblical Hebrew Vowel Reduction, Surface Trimoraic Trochees, and Multiplanar Metrical Theories
    • §1.4. Transliteration and Interpretation of the Tiberian Masoretic Orthography
  • Chapter 2. The Tiberian Hebrew Rhythm Rule in the Typology of Rhythm Rules
    • Supplement B to Chapter 2: Hebrew Stress-shift Blocking and Optimality Theory
  • Chapter 3. Discrepancies between the Tiberian Hebrew Accentual and Pausal Systems
    • §3.1. The System of `Accents' (tə`aamíim)
      • §3.1.1. Details of Accentual Constituency Parsing
      • §3.1.2. The Nature of Accentual Constituency
      • §3.1.3. Contextually-determined Disjunctive Force
      • §3.1.4. Accentual Constituency as Prosodic Structure
      • §3.1.5. Binary-branching Prosodic Phrasal Structures in other Languages, and the Linguistic Significance of the Masoretic Parse
    • §3.2. Phonological Indications of Prosodic Phrasing
      • §3.2.1. The Blocking of Stress Shifts in ``Pause'' as a Prosodic Boundary Cue
      • §3.2.2. The Continuous Column Constraint
      • §3.2.3. The Pausal Parse
    • §3.3. The Relationship between the Constituency of Accents and that of Pausal Phonology
      • §3.3.1. Characteristics of the Accentual Parse for Comparison with Pausal Phonology
      • §3.3.2. Accentual Conditioning of Pausal and Non-pausal Forms (includes a statistical analysis of a large list of examples of pausal and non-pausal forms)
      • §3.3.3. Discrepancies between Accentual Constituency and Pausal Phonology
      • §3.3.4. Verses with Pausal/Accentual Discrepancies
      • §3.3.5. Classification of Pausal/Accentual Discrepancy Verse Types
    • Supplement A to Chapter 3: Accentual Conditioning of the Rhythm Rule (nəsiigáa)
    • Supplement G to Chapter 3: List of Verses with both Pausal forms and Stress-shifted Disjunctive Non-pausal forms
  • Chapter 4. The History of Hebrew Main Stress and the Origins of the Consecutive Imperfect Stress Shift
• Compressed PDF files of the dissertation, and excerpts from the dissertation (note that if you downloaded a PDF file before September 1999, and there were problems with a font displaying in Acrobat 4, the versions of the PDF files on this site since September 1999 should work in Acrobat 4):
  • The entire dissertation in its final form is available as a .ZIP-compressed Adobe Acrobat PDF file. (Warning: 1.5 meg download. Unzip this compressed archive file after downloading, and then view the resulting PDF file with the Acrobat reader software, available for various computer platforms at the Adobe.com web-site.)
  • An excerpt from the dissertation, containing Supplement (appendix) B to Chapter 2 (on problems in accounting for Hebrew pausal stress-shift blocking in non-serial Optimality Theory) is available in .ZIP-compresssed Adobe Acrobat PDF format (175k download). This file contains the section of the dissertation which is perhaps most directly relevant to recent phonological theory (incorporating slight revisions made when submitting this as a paper to the Rutgers Optimality Archive [European mirror]).
  • Excerpts from the dissertation, containing Section 1.4 (on the linguistic and phonological interpretation of the Tiberian Biblical Hebrew diacritic orthography) and Chapter 4 (on the history of Hebrew main stress and the origins of the consecutive imperfect stress shift) are also available in .ZIP-compressed Adobe Acrobat PDF format (350k download). This file contains the sections that would probably be of most interest to Hebrew scholars who are not fully conversant with generative phonology (leaving aside chapter 3 of the dissertation, which is rather large).
  • [P.S. Note that if you access the "ProQuest Digital Dissertations" service at http://www.umi.com/ from a subscribing institution, you can download an "official" PDF of the dissertation for free; this UMI PDF includes diagonal lines in linguistic tree diagrams -- which the whole-dissertation PDF at this site does not -- but is 30 megs in size (since every page is a raw scanned bitmap), and also some uncorrected typos are present, there are some diagonal lines missing from diagram (1.2) on page 12, and Blau (1976) is missing from the bibliography. This reference is: Blau, Joshua. (1976), A grammar of Biblical Hebrew (Porta linguarum Orientalium: Neue Serie 12). Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz.] A reference which I forgot to include in the dissertation is Dick van Bergem Acoustic and Lexical Vowel Reduction, Amsterdam: IFOTT (1995), which should be cited in footnote 1.111 on page 129.
• Some lists of Biblical Hebrew stress phenomena which were generated as a result of work on the dissertation (but which are not included in the dissertation) are available in plain text format:
  • A list of instances of the rhythm rule (nəsiigáa) mainly taken from Revell (1987), augmented with accentual parse information (101k). The plain-ASCII transliteration system used is explained within the text file itself.
  • A list of cases of antepenultimate-syllable stress in the Hebrew Bible, and of other forms in which stress can be considered to be in some way antepenultimate (12k). The same transcription scheme is used as in the preceding file.
• A small plaintext file summarizing some of the basic accentual/pausal correlation statistics tabulated in Chapter 3 of the dissertation is also available (4k).
• For a quick overview of pausal phonological phenomena in Biblical Hebrew, see this excerpt of a summary by Richard Goerwitz (uses untransliterated Hebrew examples).

Formally published papers

``Towards a Constrained Theory of Morphological Discongruities: `Tops-Together' Parallel Representations'', in Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 14-17, 1992: General Session and Parasession on the Place of Morphology in a Grammar, Laura A. Buszard-Welcher, Lionel Wee, and William Weigel eds., 298-311. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1992.

``Early Arabic siin and s^iin in Light of the Proto-Semitic Fricative-lateral Hypothesis'', in Perspectives in Arabic Linguistics V: Papers from the Fifth Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 101), Mushira Eid and Clive Holes eds., 313-342. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1993.

An excerpt from another paper, ``Prosodic-Domain Sensitive Rules and Boundary Signals'', published in the University of Texas at Austin Linguistics Department working papers (Texas Linguistic Forum), is available from the department's server as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file (custom fonts did not properly embed in the file, but it should still be understandable).

Somewhat serious stuff (but not really theoretical linguistics)

• The singular "they", "their" etc. construction, including --
  • Over 75 examples from Jane Austen
  • Examples from the OED, from Lewis Carroll's Alice, etc.
• A reconstruction of the vowel system of an 18th-century common ancestor of modern "standard" dialects in England and America, which can serve as a "diasystemic" collective transcription of present-day standard English dialects.
  

Less serious stuff

• The original and "improved" versions of The House That Jack Built ("Daedal Jack")

• The Awful German Language -- Mark Twain

• A long ago proposed design for a departmental t-shirt