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Although heritage language phonology is often argued to be fairly stable, heritage language speakers often sound noticeably different from both monolinguals and second-language learners. In order to model these types of asymmetries, I propose a theoretical framework—an integrated multilingual sound system—based on modular representations of an integrated set of phonological contrasts. An examination of general findings in laryngeal (voicing, aspiration, etc.) phonetics and phonology for heritage languages shows that procedures for pronouncing phonemes are variable and plastic, even if abstract may representations remain stable. Furthermore, an integrated multilingual sound system predicts that use of one language may require a subset of the available representations, which illuminates the mechanisms that underlie phonological transfer, attrition, and acquisition.

Rhotics show considerable surface variation, which has precluded classification based on cohesive articulatory or acoustic properties. Yet they tend to display consistent patterns of behavior in relation to other phonemes within the phonological system. In this article, I argue that this apparently conflicting behavior among r-sounds is a direct result of the lack of positive content in their phonological representations. That is, the basic phonological structure of a rhotic is an unspecified consonant sonorant, which I define based on their underspecified contrastive oppositions to other phonemic categories. This proposal captures the seemingly arbitrary relationship between the phonetics and phonology present among r-sounds and accounts for why corresponding degrees of divergent surface forms are not attested for other phonological categories.

In this article we examine the allomorphic variation found in Pennsylvania Dutch plurality. In spite of over 250 years of variable contact with English, Pennsylvania Dutch plural allomorphy has remained largely distinct from English, except for a number of loan words and borrowings from English. Adopting a One Feature-One Head (OFOH) Architecture that interprets licit syntactic objects as spans, we argue that plurality is distributed across different root-types, resulting in stored lexical-trees (L-spans) in the bilingual mental lexicon. We expand the traditional feature inventory to be ‘mixed,’ consisting of both semantically-grounded features as well as ‘pure’ morphological features. A key claim of our analysis is that the s-exponent in Pennsylvania Dutch shares a syntactic representation for native and English-origin roots, although it is distinct from a ‘monolingual’ English representation. Finally, we highlight how our treatment of plurality in Pennsylvania Dutch, and allomorphic variation more generally, makes predictions about the nature of bilingual morphosyntactic representations.

This special issue of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics is dedicated to heritage languages and bilingualism.

How languages organize sounds in the speech signal into meaningful categories — and if salient differences in that signal constitute different categories — is a fundamental issue in linguistics. Because of its wide-ranging dialectal diversity, along with changing social patterns brought on by relatively recent economic prosperity, Norwegian provides an appealing test case to investigate the relationship of and interactions between phonetics and phonology and the ways in which phonetic patterns are influenced socially. Previous work in general Norwegian phonology and phonetics has focused largely on the Oslo dialect. Little attention has been paid to fine-grained variation in other Norwegian dialects, although there has been considerable investigation into dialectal patterns in segmental inventories from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. This dissertation addresses these issues by examining regional and social variation in Norwegian vowel categories and productions. This research draws on phonological theory and sociophonetic methods to investigate the extent to which Norwegian vowels’ phonological representations can capture social variation of acoustic features. Using data gathered from sociolinguistic interviews, the dissertation examines vowel productions from twenty-eight Norwegian participants who provide a cross-section of the dialectal variation in Norway. I adopt a framework in which the phonological component of the grammar consists of features that only mark language-specific contrasts. Additional articulatory and acoustic information is then filled in, often as salient social markers, in subsequent components, or levels of representation. The analysis focuses on broad dialectal differences in vowel productions and a sociophonetic investigation of three vowels in the Long Back-Vowel Chain Shift (LBCS), a diachronic change that distinguishes Norwegian — and Swedish — from other Germanic varieties. The results are consistent with a uniform phonological structure of Norwegian vowels and provide insight into how social categories influence the phonetic properties of that structure. This dissertation offers a step forward in unifying phonological theory with sociophonetic considerations by specifying the ways in which various socially differentiated variations and changes-in-progress affect representational systems in phonology.

A large region of suppressed recombination surrounds the sex-determining locus of the self-fertile fungus Neurospora tetrasperma. This region encompasses nearly one-fifth of the N. tetrasperma genome and suppression of recombination is necessary for self-fertility. The similarity of the N. tetrasperma mating chromosome to plant and animal sex chromosomes and its recent origin (<5 MYA), combined with a long history of genetic and cytological research, make this fungus an ideal model for studying the evolutionary consequences of suppressed recombination. Here we compare genome sequences from two N. tetrasperma strains of opposite mating type to determine whether structural rearrangements are associated with the nonrecombining region and to examine the effect of suppressed recombination for the evolution of the genes within it. We find a series of three inversions encompassing the majority of the region of suppressed recombination and provide evidence for two different types of rearrangement mechanisms: the recently proposed mechanism of inversion via staggered single-strand breaks as well as ectopic recombination between transposable elements. In addition, we show that the N. tetrasperma mat a mating-type region appears to be accumulating deleterious substitutions at a faster rate than the other mating type (mat A) and thus may be in the early stages of degeneration.

The mushroom Coprinopsis cinerea is a classic experimental model for multicellular development in fungi because it grows on defined media, completes its life cycle in 2 weeks, produces some 10⁸ synchronized meiocytes, and can be manipulated at all stages in development by mutation and transformation. The 37-megabase genome of C. cinerea was sequenced and assembled into 13 chromosomes. Meiotic recombination rates vary greatly along the chromosomes, and retrotransposons are absent in large regions of the genome with low levels of meiotic recombination. Single-copy genes with identifiable orthologs in other basidiomycetes are predominant in low-recombination regions of the chromosome. In contrast, paralogous multicopy genes are found in the highly recombining regions, including a large family of protein kinases (FunK1) unique to multicellular fungi. Analyses of P450 and hydrophobin gene families confirmed that local gene duplications drive the expansions of paralogous copies and the expansions occur in independent lineages of Agaricomycotina fungi. Gene-expression patterns from microarrays were used to dissect the transcriptional program of dikaryon formation (mating). Several members of the FunK1 kinase family are differentially regulated during sexual morphogenesis, and coordinate regulation of adjacent duplications is rare. The genomes of C. cinerea and Laccaria bicolor, a symbiotic basidiomycete, share extensive regions of synteny. The largest syntenic blocks occur in regions with low meiotic recombination rates, no transposable elements, and tight gene spacing, where orthologous single-copy genes are overrepresented. The chromosome assembly of C. cinerea is an essential resource in understanding the evolution of multicellularity in the fungi.