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Re: syllable importance

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Thursday, February 19, 2004, 6:30
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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John Cowan <cowan@...>