Re: THEORY: Ray on ambisyllabicity

On Sun, 15 Oct 2000, And Rosta wrote:

> Ray:
> [...]
> > As I said, I'm keeping an open mind on 'ambisyllabicity'.  At present, I
> > find the ambisyllable analysis easier to swallow than ['h&p.i].
>
> Yeah. We need to ask Dirk how he accounts for:
>
>   Sal   [saw]
>   Sally [sali]
>
> in demotic SE Insular English, if /l/ isn't in an onset in "Sally".
Wow. This is very nice! Is the /l/ in 'Sally' not velarized at all?
This would be good evidence for [s&.li].

> Also:
>
>   hoe          [h@w]
>   holy         [h@wli]   (/l/ only in 2nd syllable)
>   whole, hole  [hOw]
>   wholly       [hOwli]   (/l/ ambisyllabic, triggering vowel
>                           allophone in 1st syllable)
Hmmm. These are posers. So if I understand the forms you cite here,
the <w> in the first pair of examples is part of the tense vowel,
while in the second pair, it is the allophone of coda /l/; correct? If
this is the case, then the behavior of the "ambisyllabic" /l/ is
strange; "half" of it becomes [w], while the other "half" remains [l].
This would seem to constitute good evidence for the covert gemination
analysis of ambisyllabicity; there really are two parts to this /l/,
and they are subject to different phonological processes.

> > At 12:50 pm -0600 10/10/00, dirk elzinga wrote:
> > >I'm
> > >inclined to think that /p/ isn't ambisyllabic, and that there is no
> > >such thing as genuine ambisyllabicity.
> >
> > That's, as you know, been my inclination as an amateur linguist - nice to
> > find a professional linguist taking a similar view.  Tho it seems to lead
> > us to different conclusions regarding _happy_.
>
> Last time I wasn't hopelessly out-of-touch with phonological theory (10+ years
> ago), it seemed that just about nobody accepted ambisyllabicity, principally
> for theory-internal reasons (such as the violation of constituency principles
> that Dirk mentioned in a previous post). So if ambisyllabicity has got
> more fashionable then I too am delighted.
Arguing against a potential analysis for theory-internal reasons is
not very convincing, but I have yet to see really convincing
substantive evidence *for* ambisyllabicity which does not admit of
alternative explanations (such as the covert gemination account).

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu