Return of the minimal pairs

[Paul S. Cohen]

On Thu, 17 May 2001 15:02:54 +0300, Robert Whiting <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
wrote:

>On Mon, 14 May 2001 pausyl at AOL.COM wrote:

[ moderator snip ]

>> I'm actually on Larry Trask's side (for the most part) in this
>> discussion, but I assume that the argument from Robert Whiting's side
>> would be best stated in terms of "closed-class" vs. "open-class"
>> words; _thus_ would seem to be in the closed class.  _thy_ is surely
>> English (think of the "Lord's Prayer"), but it's also a closed-class
>> item.

>Closed-class is part of the definition of function or grammatical words.
>See Fowler, _Understanding Language_ (1974), 199.

I have no real disagreement with Bob Whiting on this point.  I chose to
insert the term "closed-class" to obviate having to argue about whether
words like _thus_ have too much lexical meaning to be "function words".
I'll settle for "function words".

>> And I would judge the Traskian point above about /oi/ never occurring
>> in native English words, even if true, to be irrelevant to the
>> discussion:

>Entirely.

>> It seems to me that no amount of introspection would help an
>> intelligent (but linguistically untrained) native speaker of English
>> to decide that _boy_ (the etymology of which is disputed) is a
>> loanword; however, it seems plausible that that same speaker could
>> uncover the fact that all words beginning with /D/ are "closed-class"
>> or the like.

>This is also irrelevant.  The fact that initial [D] occurs only in
>function or grammatical (or closed-class) words is not what keeps initial
>[T] and [D] from contrasting in English.  What keeps them from contrasting
>is the fact that initial [D] in English is always a morpheme.

Here I'm not so sure.  There's something to be said for trying to model
what's going on in the naive native speaker's sprachgefuehl, as opposed to
trying to make the simplest descriptively adequate grammar.  It's not clear
to me that initial /D/ constitutes a morpheme in (Modern) English, any more
than initial /sn/ 'nose' or /sl/ 'smooth movement' does (i.e., what used to
be known as phonesthemes).  What is clear is that /D/ starts all and
only "th" closed-class (or function, if you like) words, at least for the
highly-educated.  One datum relevant to this last point is the fact that
many speakers have /T/ as the first sound in _thither_ (for most people,
surely a word they rarely if ever hear), apparently indicating that either
they don't see it as a member of the class in question or that for them
there *is* a (marginal?) /D/~/T/ contrast initially.  The situation is not
100% clear, and that's the key point:  We need to be careful to describe
the data accurately, and to worry less if our grammars leak a bit around
their doctrinaire edges.