Re: THEORY: phonemics (was: RE: [CONLANG] Optimum

John:
> And Rosta scripsit:
>
> > > >But that still leaves us with
> > > >allophonic variation that is not conditioned positionally, which
> > > >is why I gave the example of English /t/ in foot-internal
> > > >intervocalic position, which can, inter alia, be [t] or tap [D].
>
> On reflection, I don't understand this one at all.  For me, [t] vs
> flap is completely positional, and I thought the dialects for which
> this is not so don't have flap at all.
[D] for foot-internal intervocalic /t/ occurs in old-fashioned
high-register Cockney, and as a nondownmarket alternative to
[?] in informal style in very many speakers from SE England
([D] sounding merely casual, while [?] sounds downright
demotic & street), and in allegro style in many accents. I

> > I deliberately chose the [t]/[D] allophony because it can't be
> > defined by underspecification: whereas the final /p/ allophony can be
> > defined by not specifying relase or aspiration, the intervocalic /t/
> > allophony can be defined only extensionally, as the list {[t], [D]}.
>
> They are both alveolars, though, and the idea of a category that
> unites stop and flap (which can be thought of as a stop of minimal
> length) is not absurd.
Hence my saying that the "only" is an exaggeration, in the next line
that you snipped! I think these harder cases are such that any
intensionally defined category that includes all allophones and
excludes all non-allophones requires additional assumptions about
the features/elements that define or constitute phones.

This problem might be clearer if we consider vowel allophony,
since the allophoney of some vowels sometimes seems to vaguely
resemble a gerrymandered electoral district, where a vowel
has a rather broad allophonic range, but with gaps where it
cannot trespass on the range of another.

--And.