Re: Conciseness

On Tuesday, June 8, 2004, at 06:37 , Mark P. Line wrote:

> Joe said:
[snip]
>> Yes, but those are pronominal arguments.  I probably should have made
>> myself clearer.
Yep - you should   ;)

>> A morpheme doesn't have to, but a word does.  Although, come to think of
>> it, it doesn't acutally have to be the nucleus...
>
>
> A *phonological* word has to have at least one syllable, but it could
> easily map to three or more grammatical words. Morphemes represented by a
> single segment or by suprasegmental processes will tend to be from closed
> classes, so the point you're trying to make is probably that open-class
> morphemes will almost always have at least one syllable and
The "almost always" rightly IMO sounds a note of caution, therefore....

> that therefore
> a prototypical simple transitive clause constructed from open-class
> morphemes will have at least three syllables.
I think "will generally have" might be better.

> I think that's probably a fair assumption, although there are languages
> with subsyllabic open-class morphemes -- and at least one of them could
> probably manage to provide a simple transitive clause with open-class
> morphemes that has less than three syllables. So saying that such clauses
> can't really exist is probably overstated, strictly speaking.
I think so. IME I've found generalizations like "..a simple sentence -
verb, subject, and object, can't really be expressed with less than three
syllables" tend not to be watertight. If we're talking about _conlangs_
then such statements are ever less likely to be watertight.

Ray
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