Re: syllable importance

From:    jcowan@REUTERSHEALTH.COM
> Dirk Elzinga scripsit:
> > I'm a bit skeptical about this. Plenty of counterexamples can be found:
> > 'awesome', 'cross', 'eager', 'fake', 'ill', 'like', 'loath', 'mordant',
> > 'placid', 'prime', 'real', 'right', 'rugged', 'wanton', 'wrong' all fit
> > within a trochaic frame but can't inflect;
>
> I think there are ad hoc explanations for most of these:  "awesome",
> "mordant", and "wanton" are rather spondees than trochees; adjectives that
> already end in -er or -est can't take another one; -er is bad where it
> collides with agentive -er on a homonymous verb; I don't know what to
> make of "wrong".
Another option is to construe the problem as one of morphosyntax,
rather than phonology:  some adjectives are simply marked as
not capable of taking comparison of any kind, whether analytically
or synthetically.  In my dialect I even have otherwise homophonous
lexical pairs, such as "unique", which are semantically distinct
('hapactic' and 'special'), the first of which may not take comparison,
while the second may.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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