Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: USAGE: WOMYN (was: RE: [CONLANG] Optimum number of symbols,though mostly talking about french now

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Monday, May 27, 2002, 1:54
Quoting And Rosta <a-rosta@...>:

> Tom: > > Quoting And Rosta <a-rosta@...>: > > > Tom: > > > > > "man" and "woman" are unique in pluralizing "men", "women", so the > > > > > resemblance is morphological as well as phonological. > > > > > > > > I'm not entirely convinced by that. For me, the apophony in > > > > the first syllable is the salient pluralizer, since the second > > > > syllable's vowel would reduce to schwa whether it was an > > > > underlying /&/ or underlying /E/. > > > > > > This is true, but it is consistent with 'woman' being 'wo+man'. > > > If it is not wo+man, then you leave yourself having to say it > > > is pure coincidence that wo+man is semantically and morphologically > > > a viable analysis, and that the plural is not *womans. > > > > We're getting down to one of those infamously thorny problems in > > linguistics: where to put the divide between phonology and > > morphology. I don't think anyone has ever come up with a consistent > > methodology to decide what belongs in what field. (It works the > > other way too: when something is difficult for your field, you > > do the "Linguist's punt" and put it elsewhere.) > > I don't rightly see how you would tell a purely phonological story > about this, but I take your general point about boundary drawing > and buck passing.
Well, the point is: underlying representations are mental constructs that *learners* have posited as a base from which to apply all sorts of linguistic rules. When, as I stated is the case for me with "woman", there is no evidence from phonological alternations like the German examples we discussed earlier, there can be no basis for a morphological analysis either. This is because morphemic theory, at least in its classical form, says that changes of meaning must be associated with changes of phonological form.
> I also don't think that the 'correct' analysis > of morphological irregulars is really a settlable question, though > I think that we can legitimately ask, as Ray said, how the > person in the street perceives things.
I entirely agree. I just think that in this case, there is no reason to posit distinctive URs. -- writes Tom, listening to a sublime recording of Händel's _Julius Cäsar_. ===================================================================== Thomas Wier "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n / Dept. of Linguistics mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..." University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought / 1010 E. 59th Street and not complete one road that has no turn" Chicago, IL 60637 Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers