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

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

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