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

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.)
  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?


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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