Re: THEORY: no more URs! [was: Re: Optimum number of symbols]

At 10:42 am -0600 24/5/02, Dirk Elzinga wrote:
>At 2:43 AM -0400 05/24/02, Roger Mills wrote:
>>I realize that, but hope you agree that some sort of underlying level is an
>>improvement...  Of course, Chomsky/Halle and Classical Phonemics are extreme
>>and opposite viewpoints,  and the answer, if there is one, probably lies
>>somewhere between the two....:-)
>
>Well, I'm not convinced anymore that a distinction between underlying
>and surface representations is necessary (or desireable).
Nor am I - indeed, IMO it is undesirable.

[snipped - after reading with interest]

>I am very sympathetic to this idea (no URs); I tried doing something
>like this in grad school, but I was basically "laughed off the stage"
>and didn't have the courage to pursue it then.
A pity - how foolish of your grad school.

>I take you back to your orthography discussion.
OK.....
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At 2:43 am -0400 24/5/02, Roger Mills wrote:
>Tom Wier wrote:
[snip]
>>(TW)I see that I have confused, rather than enlightened, my intended
>>audience.  My point in using phonological notation rather than
>>phonetic was to reinforce the point that /d/ and /t/ constitute
>>a salient distinction in German phonology generally, outside this
>>word, and that when this distinction is neutralized, it is
>>neutralized  to one of these two phonemes, but not both.
Is it? Is it not just as logical to regard [t] as the syllable final
allophone of /d/?  And if neutralized, why pick /t/ rather than /d/, except
for phonetic rather than phonemic reasons?

>No no no, not confusing at all.  I, and Ray (I'm sure), are well aware of
>the demands of the theory.
I am.  I am also aware that phonematicists get over this awkward problem by
positing _morphophonemic_ forms, using small forms of upper case, i.e.
small [T] and [D] (*not* X-SAMPA values!), giving the morphophonemic
//raT// and //raD// which just happen to be pronounced the same in the
nominative.

There are, in fact, many phonological problems in a phonemic analysis of
modern German which Anthony Fox discusses in his "The Structure of German"
(ISBN 0-19-815815-7).

But then, as you know, I'm not sold on the phonemic theory.

What I meant was just common sense to spell _Rad_ as _Rad_.  It is a darn
sight easier to have a rule which says that final {d}, {b}, {g} are
pronounced the same as final {t}, {p} and {k} than it would be having to
learn which words ending in {d} kept the {d} when you add endings and which
changed the {d} to {t}.

It seems to me we don't need any theories about phonemic spelling,
morphemic spelling or morphophonemic spelling, about surface forms and
'underlying forms', to explain this particular aspect of German spelling.
One just needs, to quote Umberto Eco, "to bring an oft neglected character
back to the stage, namely, common sense."
[KANT AND THE PLATYPUS, p.5]

Ray.





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Speech is _poiesis_ and human linguistic articulation
is centrally creative.
                                 GEORGE STEINER.
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