Monodialectal vs. Monodialectical

[Salikoko S. Mufwene]

I was happy to see Donald Lance's posting yesterday on "monodialectal" versus "monodialectical". I had sent a similar posting to the server, but my posting was rejected due to a minor change in my address (nothing that should concern regular correspondents). However, this morning I was re-reading E. Sapir's article on "drift" and noticed that he used "dialectic" for "dialectal." This variation reminded me a little bit of that between "syntactic" and "syntactical", with the difference that I have never heard syntacticians use the second variant. Some months ago, I think Larry Horn had an equally interesting posting on "pragmatician" and "pragmatist"--a difficulty that I typically avoided by talking about "students of pragmatics," as I found "pragmatist" inadequate for the intended meaning but had never heard "pragmatician" nor "pragmaticist" before. Did Larry give this option too? Well, I am interested in competition and selection in language evolution.

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Salikoko S. Mufwene
University of Chicago
Department of Linguistics
1010 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Tph: (773)702-8531; Fax: (773)834-0924
s-mufwene at uchicago.edu
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/depts/linguistics/faculty/mufwene.html
ON LEAVE till September 2002 but still receiving e-mail
sent to this Chicago address.
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