Re: THEORY: final features, moras, and roots [was: it's what I do]

On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, Raymond Brown wrote:

> At 8:44 pm -0400 4/10/00, Jeff Jones wrote:
>
> [...]
> >Anyway, I hope I haven't muddied the water even more!
>
> No more than they were before.  Indeed, I think your mail has - unless I'm
> misunderstanding things - confirmed what I was suspecting, i.e. _mora_
> being used with different meanings   ;)
>
> >Jeff Jones
> >Non-Japanese Non-Linguist
>
> Yes - and I'm merely an amateur linguist.  Can any of the professional
> linguists on this list make the waters clearer?
I seem to remember having this conversation before :-). Okay, here's
the poop from a phonologist working within the Generative tradition
(that would be me). A mora is a unit of syllable weight. Long vowels
have two moras, short vowels have one. This difference shows up in
stress systems: in many languages there is a principle whereby heavy
(i.e., bimoraic) syllables attract stress; this is known as the
Weight-to-Stress Principle (WtS). Languages which have been cited as
examples of the operation of WtS are Latin, Hindi, Yupik, and (various
varieties of) Arabic, among others.

In many languages where WtS is operative, syllables which are closed
by a consonant also count as heavy; in these cases, one speaks of a
consonant being moraic "by position" (i.e., as the coda of a
syllable). Again, Latin has been cited as an example of such a
language, as has Arabic.

There are also languages which show effects of WtS, but which do not
count closed syllables as heavy; Shoshoni is such a language. That's
why linguists distinguish consonants which are moraic "by position"
from those which are not. (In an interesting twist, Yupik shows both
kinds of patterns. If a consonant closes one of the first two
syllables of a word, that syllable counts as heavy and attracts
stress. Closed syllables following the second syllable are out of
luck and are always light, unless they contain a long (bimoraic)
vowel.

Pitch accent systems, such as found in Japanese and (presumably)
Ancient Greek, may follow different rules. Using the term 'mora' to
describe such systems may therefore be confusing to linguists such as
myself who know the term as applied to stress systems, regardless of
the weight of tradition supporting such usage. It's just our poor luck
that we didn't get a good Classical education.

For me, the debate over whether Japanese is "moraic" or "syllabic" is
a non-issue; Japanese is clearly divided into syllables, and is just
as clearly sensitive to the weight of those syllables. The issue for
me in Japanese is a representational one: is the onset of a Japanese
syllable adjoined to the first mora, or is it adjoined to the syllable
directly? Thus for the final syllable of the word _hatten_ the debate
is over the following representations (best viewed in a monowidth
font):

          s       s         syllable
          |\     /|\
          m m   / m m       mora
         /| |   | | |
        t e n   t e n       segment

I agree with linguists who argue for the former, the representation in
which the syllable onset is adjoined to the first mora. Evidence for
this representation comes from a language game in which the final mora
of a word uttered by the first player must serve as the initial mora
uttered by the second. Players exchange words following this pattern
for as long as possible. If a player uses a word ending in the moraic
nasal she loses, since the moraic nasal may not begin any syllable in
Japanese.

As Nik has already noted, the pitch accent system is sensitive to
syllable boundaries; hence syllables must also be recognized as
prosodic units in Japanese.

Comments/corrections welcome.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu