Re: Patterns of phoneme sequences in words


"Neeraj Mathur" <neemathur@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...

"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote

Neeraj Mathur wrote:

"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>...

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.

It's not quite that simple. For example, some two-syllable adjectives can
go either way, especially predicatively:

She's prettier/*more pretty than he is.
He's healthier/more healthy than she is.
She's ?acuter/more acute than they are.

With adverbs, -er/est isn't OK on two syllables, especially if the second
is -ly.

She ran faster. He ran more slowly.

(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.)

Yes, that's what you did say.

No, I think that was "singer" with a g.

No it wasn't. I brought that one up as a characteristic of a group of
dialects in NW England, where even "sing" has g. In these, it seems, it is
actually reasonable to say that they don't have a phoneme /N/, only /ng/,
always pronounced [Ng], except occasionally like before stops ("longed"),
where one can stipulate that the cluster [Ngd] is simplified to [Nd]. Note,
no mention of "morphemes" is necessary in the rule for these dialects.

(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.

This is silly. It makes the whole concept of "morpheme" pointless. Unless,
of course, you're going to make a distinction between "grammatical morpheme"
and "phonological morpheme", analogous to the one commonly made between
"grammatical word" and "phonological word".

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].

That one's been trotted out before, as I'm sure you know. It didn't make
much sense to me then either.

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.

That is, one's internal lexicon lists this small number of words as
exceptions, together with good/better/best. (This would suit Peter, who
could say "wrong" wasn't on his list, but might be on other people's.)

Or, what my intuition tells me is closer to the situation in my own internal
grammar, you could accept the phoneme /N/, and say that the comparative and
superlative morphemes are "-er" and "-est", except after /N/ (or, except for
"long", "strong", ...), when they're "-ger" and "-gest".

John.


.

Quantcast