Re: Verb-second ... verb-penultimate languages?

On 24/04/06, Thomas Wier <trwier@...> wrote:
> >On 24/04/06, Thomas Wier <trwier@...> wrote:
> >> [Delurking:]
> >...
> >> summer, he made the claim that all -ing forms in English are
> >> completely regular, and I had to pipe up that in my dialect
> >
> >People make a lot of claims about things that happen in English. I
> >would hazard that the majority can be falsified by looking at one
> >dialect or another, and the appropriate response is "that wasn't the
> >dialect of English I was studying or referring to", as long as you're
> >not trying to make universal-style generalisations.
>
> But that's precisely the problem:  he was making a general
> claim.  And besides which, in the theory in which Kayne is
> working, there's no principled way to distinguish between
> "dialectal" lexical features and universal properties, since
> crosslinguistic patterns are held to be universal unless
> particular, and so the set of properties/constructs contained
> in Universal Grammar is really quite large.
I don't think I know what you mean; probably I need to know more than
basically nothing about Universal Grammar before I'm likely to.
Still...

When I said "universal" I meant with regards to all languages; people
make statements like "English pronoun + clitic combinations are
regular" and "English does not contrast rounding in front vowels" and
"English contrasts length in vowels" and "English does not contrast
length in vowels" all the time, and seeing as (arguably) only one of
those holds for my dialect, I'm now in the habit of understanding
those as "A (possibly contextually specified but frequently
unspecified) dialect of English ...".

Does that change what how you interpret what I said? Or am I right in
inferring from what you said that Kayne was saying that in every
language, all equivalents of -ing forms are perfectly regular? Because
that sounds completely untenable, and I think I must've
misunderstood...

BTW: About "since crosslinguistic patterns are held to be universal
unless particular". Does that not go without saying? All balls are red
unless colored otherwise? Or does it make some other claim I have not
noticed?

> >> the participle of the verb "to lightning" is "lightning",
> >> not "lightninging", to which he responded that it was probably
> >> some haplological phonological fact.  This can't be true for me,
> >> however, since I do say "singing".)
> >
> >I would think stress trivially takes care of that. Consider
...
> But seriously, if stress were the issue, then all bisyllabic
> lexical items would feature this haplology.  The set of such
> lexical items is vanishingly small, and most are not terribly
> natural or are clearly denominal, so it's hard to test.  But
> take "to shoestring oneself along" meaning "to get by without
> using much money", and for me the participial version unquestionably
> has two "ing"s:  "He's shoestringing himself along until his
> paycheck comes in at the end of the month".   No, I don't think
> prosody has anything to do with it; this is simply a lexicalized
> exception.
Well---and take this as devil's advocate, not me telling you you're
wrong about your own speech---_"shoe%string_ is a compound composed of
two morphemes both of which underlyingly possesss stress. It's like
_"tooth%brush_; no-one would reduce the second syllable to [@] (unless
that's what "brush" has anyway, but that's not reduction). But
_"lightning_ would have (for me) a [@] except that it ends in a velar,
which much prefers unstressed [I] instead. (Well, your English
probably works differently from mine in this regard; I expect they do
in so many other ways anyway.)

--
Tristan.

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