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

On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 08:31:31 -0400, "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
said:
> Could you elaborate on the pronunciations of those pairs?  Most of
> them are perfect homophones IML.  (The exception being finger/singer,
> which don't even have the same vowel in the first syllable.)
What difference?

>   I'm not sure about "madder" the color, since I've never heard that
> word before, but I suspect it would sound the same as the "angrier"
> version.  Is there a parallel distinction between the herpetic and
> arithmetic meanings of "adder" in those same dialects?
If "madder" is monomorphemic, it'd be [m&d@] for me; whereas if it's
bimorphemic (mad+er) then it's [m&:d@]. Likewise "gladden". But before
-d the distinction is only available in four adjectives (bad, glad, mad
and sad), and so "adder" only has one pronunciation.

(However, I've never heard the words "madder"=brown or "gladden"=iris
before, but the above are the obvious spelling pronunciations.)

But, most of the examples And lists below confuse me. "Gladden" seems to
be the only example of a sound change being aware of morphological
boundaries; the rest are created using the same simple rules before and
after the sound change has ceased to become active.

--
Tristan.

>
> On 10/30/07, And Rosta <and.rosta@...> wrote:
> > 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.
> >
>
>
> --
> Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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