"syllabicity"

[CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU]

Pat Ryan wrote:

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

I replied:

>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.

I must qualify this last statement.  In and of itself, there would be no
difficulty in saying that /^/ was non-segmental if we were talking only of the
fact that /y/ (already segmental) can appear as syllabic [i] in the right
environment.  But it is hard to see why it would have had to combine with a
non-segmental /^/ to do so.  The larger difficulty concerns the treatment of
/^/ between consonants: if it's actually "between", we would expect it to be
segmental, and Lehmann would have to produce powerful evidence to claim
anything else .  He doesn't even try to prove it.

Leo

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