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

>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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