Re: THEORY: Ray on ambisyllabicity

Dirk (to Ray):
> I think the confusion comes from our respective usages of the term
> "gemination." Gemination as I've been using the term is a structural
> property of phonological representations which may be realized
> phonetically in a number of ways: 1) extra length, 2) "fortis" or
> "tense" articulation, 3) aspiration, or 4) voicing and continuancy
> contrasts. There are probably others.
In the terminology I've been familiar with, "gemination" means
phonological doubling manifested by extra length (neither one if
without the other). The class that includes your (1-4) would be
called "fortis", where there is no single phonological or phonetic
property characterizing fortisness, "fortis" being defined as
"stronger than 'lenis' on the scale of fortition".

> What all of these realizations have in common is that
> they are all ways of encoding the structural property of a single
> segment's content being spread over two structural positions.
Am I right in thinking that you subscribe to a theory that tries,
for the sake of explanatoriness, to define what I'd call 'fortisness'
in terms of a phonological property of one segment occupying two
positions?

> > I can understand the argument of those who maintain that the /p/ in English
> > _happy_ is ambisyllabic.  But at present I neither accept nor reject the
> > theory.
>
> I am also open to convincing arguments for ambisyllabicity. So far I
> haven't seen them, though.
Well, consider the evidence I've been producing. Consider also that if there
is no null hypothesis among

    I.      II.      III.
  s   s    s   s    s   s
  |\  |    |  /|    |\ /|
  V C V    V C V    V C V

then assuming (III) halps account for why there are in so many cases either
no clear reasons for choosing between (I) and (II) or conflicting reasons
for choosing (I) over (II) or vice versa, which, moreover, are typically
reasons that are not incompatible with (III).

--And.