Re: THEORY: Dirk on ambisyllabicity

Dirk:
> On Sun, 8 Oct 2000, And Rosta wrote:
>
> > Dirk:
> > > (Some have even argued that ambisyllabic
> > > consonants are really geminates in disguise since they also share the
> > > property of belonging to two syllables at once; interesting that in
> > > English many of these are written with two consonant letters, as in
> > > the word 'happy'.)
> >
> > What is the argument for them being geminates in disguise? -- Given
> > that they're not lengthened phonetically, and given that some
> > English speakers (e.g. me) have, at a phonological level, minimal
> > pairs such as _stilly_ (adj. [archaic]) [stIli] vs. _stilly_ (adv. <
> > still + -ly) [stIlli].
>
> The arguments are as follows (as I understand the issue):
>
> 1.  These medial consonants are affiliated to the left because
> otherwise lax vowels would appear in open syllables, which is not
> attested word-finally (pace Ray, and the Northern dialect evidence he
> cites).
(Ray's observations could also be made of some Southern US dialects,
i.e. the HAPPY vowel being realizationally the same as the BIT or BET
vowel, and for a wider range of US dialects it may be that the HUT
vowel is realizationally the same as the final vowel in LAVA.)

> 2. They are affiliated to the right because of "universal" principles
> of syllable structure; namely, syllables should have onsets where
> possible.
>
> 3. Having a single segment occupy a place in two separate syllables
> violates universal principles of constituency; i.e., the
> representation [a[b]c] is not well formed, where [ab] and [bc] are
> taken to be constituents.
>
> 4.      Therefore, an ambisyllabic consonant really occupies two
> positions and is hence a geminate.
>
> I don't find argument 2 compelling *in this case*, and so I don't
> really consider "ambisyllabic" consonants to be covert geminates.
> Especially given that they are not pronounced particularly long. I
> prefer syllabifying such consonants to the left (hence 'happy' =
> [h&p.i], since I *do* find the distributional argument (1) convincing.
>
> > FWIW (= not very much), my conclusion is that timing units are separate
> > from syllable structural units. E.g. (using O = onset, R = rhyme, T =
> > timing units):
> >
> >      O     R   O R          O     R     O R
> >     / \   / \ /  |         / \   / \    | |
> >    T   T T   T   T        T   T T   T   T T
> >    |   | |   |   |        |   | |    \ /  |
> >    s   t i   l   i        s   t i     l   i
> >
> >        [stIli]              [stIlli]
>
> I would agree. I would go further and say that onsets are not involved
> in timing relations, and that such relations are best expressed by
> morae.
>
>             s     s              s     s
>            /|    /|             /|\   /|
>           / m   / m            / m m / m
>          /  |  /  |           /  | |/  |
>         st  I l   i          st  I l   i
Don't you mean this? :-

             s     s              s     s
            /|    /|             /|\   /|
           / m   / m            / m m / m
          /  |\ /  |           /  | |/  |
         st  I l   i          st  I l   i

Apart from this, I agree with everything you say. I considered using
diagrams like yours, but hesitated for several reasons.

(1) I'm not aware of positive arguments for a s node (though in effect
O and s seem to be notational equivalents).

(2) For most dialects of English there is a rule that the nucleus and
the coda can each branch (into two segments each) only if the coda is
coronal. (For A-lengthening dialects, the rule holds only for nasal
+ plosive codas, because long A introduces exceptions elsewhere.) It's
not clear to me how this contraint would be formulated in a mora-based
analysis if it eschews nucleus and rhyme nodes. [Incidentally, if
/ink/ and /eip/ are both bimoraic, to which mora does the medial segment
in each word belong?]

(3) I'm not sure whether the the moraic analysis allows for (A)
segmentally empty positions such as would account for liaison blocking
in French (H-aspire, and ouatte/watt [ex. borrowed from someone else
(J-R Vergnaud?)], and perhaps for AN-cliticization in English and (B)
for unattached segments, such as word-initial geminates in 'classical'
Calabrese (which are realized as geminates only when following a
vowel-final word).

I'd be very interested to hear answers to these, though if anyone thinks
the discussion should be taken off-list, do pipe up and say so (ideally
without changing the Subject line, because I have to delete a lot of
Conlang messages without reading them).

--And.