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

From:Thomas Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Monday, April 24, 2006, 1:24
>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.
>> 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 > "prairie" ["pre:ri], *[pre:], *[pri] and > "librarian" [lAe"brerij@n], *[lAe"brij@n], *[lAe"brej@n] versus > "library" ["lAebri], *["lAebreri], *["lAebre(:)]. >(I think the equivalent American pronunciation of "library" is >stigmatised, but it's stress that determines the haplology that's my >concern.)
Actually, the stigmatized version is [lAibEri], with cluster reduction, famously put by Marge Simpson: Lisa: "... no, Mom, it's fo-lee-age, not foil-age", Marge: "Ah, foilage! We can't excape Lisa, our little walking liberry!" 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. ========================================================================= Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally, Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of 1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter. Chicago, IL 60637

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Tristan Alexander McLeay <conlang@...>