Re: Eliding repeated morphemes: synthesis vs analysis

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>

> This started me cogitating.  At first it seemed obviously a difference
> between analysis and synthesis, but now I'm not so sure.  Consider the
> English possessive in -'s, for instance.  Is that considered an analytic
> or
> synthetic feature?  We say "Mark and Jody's house", not "Mark's and
> Jody's house".  Is that "Mark and (Jody's)", with the -'s simply
> understood
> to be applied to "Mark" as well, or is it "(Mark and Jody)'s", with
> the -'s actually being applied to the phrase as a whole?
I'm glad you brought this up, Marcos.  I've always been taught that the last
element in a list of this sort was the one that carried the possessive,
applying it to all: "We went to Mark, Jody, Fran, and Dana's house this
weekend."  Mark, Jody, Fran and Dana all own the same house or live in it.
Likewise, I think you could also say: "I went to Mark, Jody, Fran, and
Dana's houses this weekend."  Mark, Jody, Fran, and Dana all own or live in
separate houses and I went to see them separately.  However, I think this
second is ambiguous, because Mark et al might own the same houses together.
Interesting!

> Are there clear instances in natlangs when morphological inflections can
> be
> applied only to one of a series of repeated words while being understood
> to apply to the whole list?
I posed a very similar question on a different list.  I wanted a term for
the following kind of ellision, such that you can say in English: "High are
the hills, dim the valleys, empty the villages, overgrown with briars"
(straight out of "The Wife's Lament," tenth century), where the single
copula takes care of the rest of the statements (except the last).   The
term "gapping" was offered.  It seems to be a time-honored way of expressing
things in English, and hasn't entirely died out.  Or so I thought.  I was
digging my heels in against an editor who objected to a sentence of mine (I
can't remember the actual sentence but I'll provide a similar one):  "The
boy was soft-spoken, his answer barely audible."  Everyone I vetted this
statement with at my university understood it perfectly and didn't find it
lacking.  I think my editors felt it was not only confusing without the
extra copula, but that it was a comma splice (lacking an "and"); and, even
worse, one that spliced a fragment.

Sally