Re: Patterns of phoneme sequences in words


"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:448C0DD8.71DF@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Neeraj Mathur wrote:

"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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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/.)

This rule I certainly know. The question is whether it is a productive
rule
of our grammars, or whether - for some speakers at least - it is simply a
general observation about the lexicon.

What is your explanation for what seems like the insertion of /g/ in
'wronger' as described by John and Brian?

I didn't notice such a description. Or is that what I mentioned sounded
Bronx? (Nonstandard, that is.) No, I think that was "singer" with a g.
(A problem is that there are so few final -N adjectives and verbs.)

Well I'd quoted it in my posts; John wrote: '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.' Brian said that the same
thing happened to him. I'm happy for this to be non-standard, but I wonder
if I can make it consistent with my earlier position (that [Ng] only appears
morpheme-internally) by suggesting that for these speakers, the comparative
'longer' is a single morpheme, not two.

The whole point of this is that, if one could predict on the basis of
morphology alone, whether you get [Ng] or just [N], there would be a case to
make that these are both realisations of the phoneme sequence /ng/, and that
English has no phoneme /N/. So 'sin' and 'sing' don't differ phonemically as
/sIn/ and /sIN/, but as /sIn/ and /sIng/, and that at the morpheme-boundary
that sequence /ng/ is pronounced [N].

To accomodate John's and Brian's pronunciations, we could modify this to
make a specific exception for the -er and -est suffixes, but it would be
most compact if we simply made 'longer' and 'longest' into single-morpheme
units, and deny that there is any morpheme boundary inside these words.

Neeraj Mathur


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