Re: LONG: Latest Wenetaic Stuff

Hey.

Several replies to several messages.

On Fri, 29 Oct 1999, Tom Wier wrote:

> Right -- in German, the allophones of /x/ are:
>
> [C] when following a front vowel, and
> [x] when following a back vowel.
>
> It doesn't occur *before* any vowels, so that doesn't come into
> the question.
Of course you realize that the German situation is not that
simple. [C] can appear following back vowels and consonants, and
both [x] and [C] occur freely before vowels, just not word-
initially. Consider the pair of words [kux@n] 'cake' and [kuC@n]
'little cow'. In both, the fricative precedes the vowel, and in
[kuC@n], [C] follows a back vowel. Of course there's a morpheme
boundary in [kuC@n] which isn't present in [kux@n], but that
just underscores the complexity of the situation.

On Fri, 29 Oct 1999, Tom Wier wrote:
>
> I don't really see any reason to analyse "the" or "a/an" as clitics.  It
> seems to me that a better analysis is that they can undergo phonological
> reduction, which occurs in lots of words which most certainly *aren't*
> clitics (like "then" /DEn/ --> /D@n/, and "that" /D&t/ --> /D@t/).
Matt already answered this one, and I find his arguments
persuasive.

> The only real clitic-y form in the English language (AFAIK) is the
> so-called genetive case ending, <'s>, which functions on the phrasallevel
> rather than the wordlevel.
All of the auxiliary verbs in English have clitic forms which
occur in second position. Wackernagel observed that Germanic
finite verbs act as clitics in this sense; they must occur in
second position (at least in main clauses).

On Fri, 29 Oct 1999, Nik Taylor wrote:
>
> Tom Wier wrote:
> > Actually, English has a couple postpositions.  "asunder" and "apart"
> > both act as postpositions:  "He broke it asunder", and "He broke
> > it apart".   German "entlang" and (I think) "entgegen" also operate
> > along similar lines.
>
> I dunno about that.  I think that in those cases those are like the "up"
> in "run up" (in the sense of "run a bill up").  I don't see any
> postpositional relationship there.
On the contrary, both of these are genuine postpositions with
clearly locative meanings (e.g. entlang 'along'; Er fuhr die
Strasse entlang 'He drove along the street').

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu                 "All grammars leak."
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~elzinga/               -Edward Sapir