THEORY/YAEPT: Re: Terkunan: rules for deriving nouns, verbs, adjectives

Dirk Elzinga, On 30/10/2007 18:33:
> On 10/30/07, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:
>> The GMP *should not* distinguish between morphological endings and
>> normal stem ends (where they are word-final), because real sound
>> changes *do not make such distinctions*.  You are trying to simulate
>> something that *just doesn't happen* in natlangs.  If a final -m
>> goes away, for instance, it does so no matter what kind of morpheme
>> it is part of.
>
> It is not true that sound changes do not take morphological boundaries
> into account. Consider the following examples from a non-standard
> variety of English:
[...]
> So it seems that morphological information is crucial to understanding
> this change, and your statement that "sound changes don't care the
> least of the morphological structure
> of the word" is not true, or is at best overstated.
Further examples from English (English being the language I know something about):

Here are some minimal pairs in various accents of English.

finger : singer [everywhere but NW England]

madder (brown) : madder (more mad)
gladden (iris) : gladden (make glad) [various places]

pause : paws [SE England]

hula : ruler [SE England]

holy : holey [SE England]

nose : knows [Leeds]

pride : pried [Northumbria]

brood : brewed [Scotland, Ireland]

The second item in each pair contains a morpheme boundary & has a phonetic
realization found only when a morpheme boundary is present.

The notion that phonology is blind to morphological juncture is an erroneous (and
nowadays obsolete?) piece of dogma.

--And.

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