Abstract
This paper provides a comparative analysis of word-final nasals in Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya based on speech data from Quintana Roo (Mexico). In Yucatecan Spanish, a nasal is often pronounced as [m] if placed at the end of a word (e.g., Yucatá[m] instead of Yucatá[n]). Since this phenomenon is widespread on the Yucatán Peninsula, but largely unknown in other Spanish-speaking regions, it is often linked to the influence of the indigenous language Yucatec Maya. Our Spanish dataset differs from our Yucatec Mayan one in that the labialization rate significantly increases with the length of the subsequent pause in the former, but not in the latter. Thus, even if the feature was originally transferred from Yucatec Maya to Spanish, it seems that it has taken on a life of its own in Yucatecan Spanish, determined by its function as a marker of prosodic prominence.
French -age developed from Latin relational adjectives in -aticus that were by and by nominalized, thereby incorporating the former head noun as a semantic constituent. In this article, it is argued that the Modern French -age derivation originated from the (re-)association of a semantically vacuous formative and an abstract semantic feature. This semantic feature gradually emerged through abstraction from the existing concrete derivatives and, once established, has determined the range of possible interpretations of newly coined formations up to this day. The most important result of the analysis is that, apart from a structural reanalysis of the Latin nominalized relational -aticus adjectives, French -age did not undergo any meaning change at all, the stability of its meaning being due to the abovementioned continuous interplay between the abstract semantic feature and the usage of the various concrete -age nominalizations.