Re: THEORY: ambisyllabicity & gemmination (long)

Thanks for the very helpful reply - Sorry I haven't responded sooner, but
pressure of work put me into 'lurker mode' for much of last week.

At 12:50 pm -0600 10/10/00, dirk elzinga wrote:
>On Sat, 7 Oct 2000, Raymond Brown wrote:
[...]
>> English ambisyllabic consonants masy be "geminates in disguise", whatever
>> that means, but they most certainly are not geminates.  The /p/ in _happy_
>> /'h@pi/ is one of these so-called ambisyllabic consonants.  It is very
>> different from the /p/ in Welsh _hapus_ (happy) /'hap1s/ where /p/ is
>> pronounced [pp_h] and gemination is as clearly marked as it is in, e.g.
>> Italian _cappa_ (cape, cloak).
>
>Is _hapus_ the spelling of the word in Welsh? If so, how is gemination
>marked? In Italian, gemination is marked in the orthography by
>doubling the letter, but I don't see this doubling in the Welsh word.
>Or are you using "marked" in the Praguean sense?
No, I think not.  Sorry - I wasn't using 'marked' in a technical sense.  I
should, I guess, have said 'perceptible' in pronunciation.  It's a
conditioned allophone pf /p/.  After a stressed vowel, the voiceless
plosives are always pronounced geminate with aspiration as the onset of the
following syllable.  Thus, e.g. _ateb_ ['att_he:b] "answer"

>> Ignoring the question of morae, and just thinking in terms of syllabic
>> onset, nucleus and coda, presumably Dirk's analysis above would mean that
>> the Welsh word would be represented thus:
>>          s     s
>>         /|\   /|\
>>        o n c o n c
>>        | | |/  | |
>>        h a p   1 s
>>
>> Does that mean that the English word is:
>>          s     s
>>         /|\   /|\
>>        o n c o n c
>>        | |  \| | |
>>        h @   p i 0   [0 = zero element"]   ?
>
>I'm not sure I understand the significance of the representational
>distinctions you make here between
Nor I - merely guessing  :)

>        c o       c o
>        |/   and   \| ; they are the same.
>        p           p
OK - I accept that.

[...]
>
>In a theory which does not recognize moras, I would insert a "timing
>tier". The timing tier is a level which represents segmental "place-
>holders". So your Welsh representation would be minimally altered to
>the following:
>
>          s       s
>         /|\     /|\
>        o n c   o n c
>        | | |   | | |
>        x x x   x x x
>        | |  \ /  | |
>        h a   p   1 s
>
>Gemination is shown in such a theory by doubly linking a single
>feature bundle (labial, voiceless, stop; here represented by /p/)
>with two timing units.
Yep - that makes more sense, I think, especially in the Welsh case where
[pp_h] is a conditioned allophone of /p/.

>> Also, is the /p/ in English _happy_ really ambisyllabic?
>
>Well, this is one of the Big Questions of English phonology.
I know   ;)

>I'm
>inclined to think that /p/ isn't ambisyllabic, and that there is no
>such thing as genuine ambisyllabicity.
That's, as you know, been my inclination as an amateur linguist - nice to
find a professional linguist taking a similar view.  Tho it seems to lead
us to different conclusions regarding _happy_.

[snip]
>In his book, _The Phonology of English_, Mike Hammond marshalls a vast
>array of distributional evidence to argue for the representation which
>you reject; viz. [h@p.i].
That division seems more in keeping with [&p?i] which is not unknown in the
London area.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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