Re: Patterns of phoneme sequences in words

Am Sun, 11 Jun 2006 12:17:08 GMT schrieb Peter T. Daniels:

Neeraj Mathur wrote:

"Brian M. Scott" <b.scott@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1bvkwspwdtrdp.1leszwqs9ivz1$.dlg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Thu, 08 Jun 2006 05:25:47 GMT, John Atkinson
<johnacko@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:vxOhg.5388$ap3.104@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> in
sci.lang:
In my (Australian) dialect, [g] is only added to [N]
morpheme-final when the following morpeme is comparative
<-er> or superlative.<-est>. Thus <longer>, 'more long'
and <longer> 'a person who longs' aren't homophones.

Likewise.

Well, how much of a case is there, in your dialects, for thinking of -er
and -est as morphemes? Put another way, is 'longer' a single morpheme? Do
you have three words - long, longer, longest - which are now treated by your
dialect as each being single morphemes, which only closer analysis reveals
as having had at one point an ancestry in derivational morphology? Could
this explain why -er and -est cannot be added to all adjectives? Perhaps we
learn the ones that do take them as single-morpheme units, and that's why we
can't say 'excellenter' or even 'gooder'.

Try this experiment on an unsuspecting mate with a similar dialect: ask them
what the comparative of the adjective 'blick' is; try making up a few others
as well. Let's see how many of them give us 'blicker', and how many 'more
blick'. Now try with Ned adjectives: try maybe 'thring' and see if they give
you [TriNr], [TriNgr], or [mor TriN].

Incidentally, is there anybody else who gets the impression that the British
are rather more tolerant of fluidity between nouns and adjectives, with a
fairly productive set of comparitives? I remember being rather amused the
first time I heard somebody complain about getting 'the shittest room in
college' - not possible in my Toronto English, but a staple of my revised
idiolect!

The rule is about as simple as a rule can be: one- or two-syllable
adjectives (long, blick, thring, shitty) take -er/-est, longer ones take
more/most. (Note, however, that "wrong" doesn't insert /g/.)

What I learned at school is that -er/est for two-syllable words requires
that it ends in y -er -le, or is stressed on the second syllable; otherwise
it takes more, most.

Joachim
.

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