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

From:SMITH,MARCUS ANTHONY <smithma@...>
Date:Wednesday, July 11, 2001, 17:29
On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> > I think you misunderstood my question. What I meant was, would a > > knowledge of the language's structure allow you to predict whether > > _kasta_ would be two or three morae? In other words, would a speaker of > > this language know whether it would be two or three morae? > > 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.
I am inclined to disagree with you here, at least on such scanty evidence. Many languages around the world have mora-based poetry, Japanese being the most obvious one to me. Saying that morae are not available to native intuition makes me wonder how mora-sensitive poetry can be constructed without rigorous analysis of the language. Syllables are also theoretical constructs, yet people can break a word into syllables without any training. My Pima consultant started doing this spontaneously, for example. He even deleted very salient epenthetic segments. As an illustration, he broke up [Tok@Dot] 'spider' as [Tok .Dot], and [komkIdZ1t] 'tortoise' as [komk. dZ1t]. (This epenthesis is subject to a regular phonological rule, it is not simply phonetics.) In short, I think you should be less hasty in dismissing morae from native intuition. Marcus

Replies

Thomas R. Wier <artabanos@...>
Marcus Smith <smithma@...>