"syllabicity"

CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU
Mon May 10 17:16:52 UTC 1999


Pat Ryan wrote in response to the following:

>>>> Thus, Lehmann violates a major principle when he asserts that any stage of
>>>> Indo-European lacked a phonemic vowel:  If a phone is present in a
>>>> language, it has a psychological status in the lexicon, and while it may
>>>> alternate with other sounds in the language because of morphological rules
>>>> or unconstrained processes, it cannot be denied phonemic status.
>
>Unless it contrasts with another vowel, which produces a *semantic*
>difference, I believe it is correct to say that the phone is not phonemic.

More precisely, we must say that it *could indicate* a semantic difference.  In
English, /i:/ and /ai/ are phonemically distinct, even though _either_ means
the same no matter how it is pronounced in that word.  Nor do they
indicate a semantic difference in the context /l_t/, there being no word
*_leet_ to contrast with _light_.  It's the semantic difference between _meet_
and _might_ that shows that /i:/ and /ai/ are phonemically distinct; we cannot
say that phonemes ever *produce* a semantic difference.

[stuff omitted]

>But, Lehmann would accord segmenticity to syllabicity, I am relatively
>certain.

He doesn't.  For his "pre-stress" stage, he specifically posits "A
non-segmental phoneme /^/, syllabicity" (_PIEP_, p. 112).  For the stage
"pre-IE with phonemic stress", /^/ is non-segmental, like the phonemes /"/
("maximum stress") and /'/ ("minimum stress"), but he asserts that /"^/ (a
sequence? or simultaneous?) "becomes segmental; allophone [e]" (_PIEP_ p. 113).
(This is a non-standard use of the word "allophone"; the more modern
"realization" would have been much more appropriate.)  But he adds: "In the
neighborhood of resonants it [i.e. /^/ -- LAC] combines with segmental phonemes
[i.e. the resonants -- LAC] in simultaneous articulation:..."  Thus /y^/ yields
[i], etc.  In these two stages his /^/ is most emphatically *not* segmental,
which is what I and some others have been hollering about: it makes no sense to
say it's not.

It's not clear quite what he means for the "period of non-distinctive stress".
He says that [e e: e{sub}] are no longer allophones of /^/ but rather separate
phonemes.  I assume he means them to be segmental at this stage, but he doesn't
actually say so.  Ditto the subsequent "stage of pre-IE with distinctive
pitch".

>> Thus, since even an extremist monovocalic IE phonology would oppose a 3sg in
>> *-t to a 2pl in *-te, it must have a phoneme /e/.  This of course does not
>> detract from the stimulating effect of the book - just look at us!

>With the best attempt to see this, I confess I cannot.  The difference
>between *-t and -*te is simply explained by paying attention to the
>stress-accentuation: *"-t(i) and *-"te.

Won't work.  Consider the perfect active, where the 3.sg. desinence is PIE -e,
but the stress was on the root (as demonstrated by accent in Greek and
Sanskrit and failure of Verner's Law to operate on Germanic preterite singular
forms, though the plurals were affected; we might also note that the form had
o-grade vocalism rather than zero or reduced grade, as in the plural).
(Yes, it is true that most Greek perfects are reduplicated, and the
reduplication has the accent in the singular.  But the few unreduplicated
perfects do accent the root: _o^de_ 'he knows'.  And augmented or not, thee
plural forms do accent the desinence.)

>IMHO, the morpheme for the second and third persons, containing <t>, has a
>unitary origin: *T{H}O, 'tribe-member'.

Given the tone of recent discussions, I'd best not say what I think of that
proposal.  Let's settle for a notational matter.  Angled brackets are used to
indicate *graphemes*, i.e. units of *written notation*.  <t> means very
precisely "lower-case t", not any kind of raw sound [t] or phoneme /t/ or
morpheme {t} (all standard notations, by the way).  It's OK to fudge by simply
italicizing everything, but don't use a specific notation if you don't mean it.

Leo

Leo A. Connolly                         Foreign Languages & Literatures
connolly at latte.memphis.edu              University of Memphis



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