Re: Dropping from the root

Dirk Elzinga wrote:

>On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, Marcus Smith wrote:
>
>Hmmm. You mentioned earlier that there is no way to predict
>whether a verb will truncate by dropping a final consonant or an
>entire rime. There are also apparently verbs which don't
>truncate. It already sounds like the system is irregular in
>much the same way as the strong verbs of English.
This is a system that hasn't been studied in any detail as far as I can
tell. An quick survey of many truncating words does reveal some tendancies
though. These should be taken with a grain of salt, pending a more in depth
study.

- All rime deletions involve a high vowel and a simpleton coda
- Truncation doesn't seem to involve diphthongs
- Among the consonants, truncation only involves stops and nasals

Some of these might be statistical accidents though, since there are only
two non-high vowels (opposed to three high vowels), and fricatives and the
one glide are not common word endings. Still, that makes you wonder about
diphthongs and the lateral escaping completely, both of which are common
word finally.

>Perhaps this gives a little more credence to the unnamed
>morphologist's assertion that truncation isn't productive ...
Perhaps, but even so, I wouldn't feel bad about arguing with her, because
her conclusion was based on theory internal grounds, and she did not
provide a scrap of evidence for her claim. The reasoning went roughly as:
morphology is concatenative, that is why truncation is not a regular
process. She offered no support for the claim that truncation is irregular,
even after we objected; she simply gave in.




Marcus Smith

Unfortunately, or luckily,
no language is tyrannically consistent.
All grammars leak.
                -- Edward Sapir

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