Re: Moraic codas [was Re: 'Yemls Morphology]

"Thomas R. Wier" wrote:
> Oh, well, you didn't say that a speaker's intuitions are being called into
> play. I thought (based on what you wrote) that you were asking whether
> someone sitting outside the system, so to speak, analyzing the language
> from a theoretical point of view, would be able to predict the moraicity
> I would still say "no", however, because first of all, moraicity is a theoretical
> construct, and is not something that you can just sense with a native speaker's
> intuition:  it needs to be there to explain the data, but that is sensed only after
> much analysis of the language.  Secondly, and relatedly,  my original points
> still hold true:  because underlying representations are themselves also theoretical
> constructs, like moraicity, most people cannot just sense them.   They are derived
> within a theoretical framework because they're needed to explain the data, not
> because they are themselves data.  This means therefore that you still have to look
> at a variety of words, and that one individual word will not be able to tell you
> how many moras a particular word has:  you have to look at the whole system
> before you can make any judgements.
Well, not just intuition, but rather, would a given consonant as coda
always be moraic or non-moraic?  Like, if the language had a penultimate
mora stress rule, would it be predictable that _katas_ would be katás
rather than kátas?  Or would you have to mark whether this was a moraic
s or a non-moraic s?  Or if, like Japanese, every mora had the same
length, would _katas_ predictably be pronounced as three units?

On a related note, would it be realistic for a language to distinguish
between, for instance, /tandu/ and /tan=du/?  In my U-descendant, /na/
becomes /n@/ which then becomes /n=/, but U already has /n/ as a coda,
so Classic U /tandu/ would become /tandu/, but /tanadu/ would become
/tan=du/

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