Syllabicity

[CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Sprry I can't respond to more of the statements in Pat's latest, but I have to
leave town in the morning to see my oldest graduate, and it's now nearly 2 AM.
Anyway:

>Leo continued:

>> 2.  There are a few established terminologies.  The plural morpheme of
>> English (we definitely do have one) can be called "bound" because it occurs
>> only when connected to the "free" morpheme of a root.  It can be said to
>> have "grammatical meaning", or be called a "grammatical morpheme".  There
>> are not my terms; they're standard.  What's not standard is to say that
>> plural -s does not have "semantic" meaning, since (in normal usage) *all*
>> meaning is "semantic".

>Pat responds:

>I am well aware of this usage and terminology.

Is there some reason why you don't adhere to it?  Some of your arguments seem
to depend on your *not* accepting it.  Why don't you?

[Leo sought a parallel for homonymous suffixes -- hoping to suggest that if the
family words do contain a suffix, it needn't be the agentive suffix.]

>> And then of course, we have -er words which do *not* contain any of the
>> above, such as _cider_ and _spider_.  So what is wrong with saying that the
>> element seen in _father_, _mother_, _brother_, and _daughter_ (but not
>> _sister_, where the -t- is a secondary development) is different from the
>> agentive suffix?

>Pat responds:

>According to my dictionary, spider contains agentive -*ter; and cider is not
>derived from IE. If IE did have triliteral roots, you might have a point.

You mean, spider is *descended*, they say, from a form containing an IE
agentive suffix.  But that's quite another matter.  Other -er-words in English
are synchronically analyzed as having suffixes; spider and cider (whose
etymology is irrelevant) are not -- which, BTW, is why I and many others
pronounce them with [^i] rather than [ai], i.e. with the vowel of _writer_
rather than _rider_.

>However, I fail to see how the points you have presented relate meaningfully
>to the point I am attempting to make.

>I claimed above that -*ter, the common component of 'father, mother,
>brother, daughter', is not coincidental but a regular component of basic
>nuclear family terminology. On the basis of words like *g{^}en6-ter-
>(procreator, father), I believe it likely that it should be interpreted as
>an agentive. But even if it were not agentive -*ter, it is beyond the bounds
>of reasonable scepticism to suppose that its multiple attestations in family
>member terminology is not analyzable as a suffix.

My objection, originally, was precisely to the notion that it was an agent
suffix.  I didn't mean to deny that there was a suffix, although I do wonder
whether that is the best analysis.  A suffix on what?

>Leo commented:

>> Problem: Pokorny's *pa:- means 'feed; pasture'.  Add an agent suffix to that
>> and you get 'shepherd', not 'father'.  And this aside from the problem of
>> the weak grade of the alleged root.

>Pat responds:

>Well, strange that you missed na{"}hren in his definition. Which means 'to
>feed (animal, child); and failed to put that together with *pap(p)a,
>'father, *food* (not animal feed!). If the nuclear family terminology under
>consideration designated typical functions, 'feeder' for father certainly
>would not be amiss.

If the words were formed that way!  But _papa_ ia every bit as much a Lallwort
as _mama_.  Parents read amazing things into baby's babbling.

>And frankly, I am at a loss to see any problem with a reduced grade of the
>root preceding a suffix (agentive -*ter), which normally takes the
>stress-accent. Am I missing something?

I don't know.  Why did you bring that up?

>Pat, withdrawing:

>I refuse to get into another futile discussion of Lallwo{"}rter. Actually,
>one of the interseting arguments for monogenesis is the intriguing
>similarity of <lallen> all over the world.

That saya much about babies and little about languages, or monogesis thereof.

><snip>

>Leo coninues on a different topic:

>> I don't have Larry's dictionary.  But I'll say this point blank: what he
>> gives is merely a characteristic of phonemes.  Morphemes must consist of one
>> or more phonemes (despite the problem of "zero allomorphs").  It is because
>> of this that phonemes are the smallest units capable of *signaling* meaning.
>> But they are units of *sound*.  It might be helpful if you included Larry's
>> *entire* comment, for what you're citing is simply *not* a definition of a
>> phoneme.  See any manual of linguistics which actually discusses the things!

>Pat, for Leo's edification:
>
>phoneme . . . n. In many theories of phonology, a fundamental (often *the*
>fundamental) unit of phonological structure, an abstract *segment* which is
>one of a set of such segments in the phonological system of a particular
>language or speech variety, ___often defined as 'the smallest unit which can
>make a difference in meaning'___.

Larry is cautious and trying to include as many theories as possible.  But
"unit of phonological structure" refers precisely to the *sound* system.  I
have never seen the phoneme *defined* anywhere as he does in the final clause,
although it happens to be a true statement, it's a characterization rather than
a definition.  Unfortunately,
it is  misleading.  In some of your earlier stuff, you seem to have
taken it to mean that phonemes actually *have* meaning.  And quite certaiunly
you're wrong when you claimed that lack of a difference in meaning must mean
that the difference in sound *must* be irrelevant.  While I've quarreled enough
with Lehmann, his idea that [e e: {e}] became separate phonemes when they were
no longer predictable, because of changes in the accentual system, is good
structuralist theory, and not original with him.  What happens, in a nutshell,
is that the different vowels are no longer predictable but instead signal
whatever it was that the difference in accent signaled, while it existed.

>Leo responded re ablaut:

>> I have no idea whether it was a deliberate anything.  All I know is that
>> short e alternates with short o, and that the two traditional kinds of long
>> e: alternate with long o:.  The "lengthened grade" variety also alternates
>> with short e/o; the "natural long" ones deriving from vowel + laryngeal
>> alternate with traditional schwa.  Once established, it could be exploited.

>Pat comments:

>And "exploited" it was, to provide a nuance.

Over time, often more.  But that was over time.

>Pat continued:

>If I understand you correctly, you are maintaining that the earliest IE had
>an [e:] which was phonemic (contrasted with [e/o]) and was not the result of
>a reduction of [He] or [eH]; this is what I presume you mean by "original".

Probably not the earliest.  I speak here of lengthened grade, or of the [e:] in
Lehmann's version of things.

>I am asking you to identify an "original" [e:], e.g. in a verbal root,
>*Ce:C, which has a perfect stem *Co:C. A root for which we reconstruct *CeHC
>will, of course, not qualify.

Indeed not.  We must be talking past each other on this.  But lengthened grade
does show ablaut.  The word for 'foot' has Doric Greek nom. sing _po:s_, which
supposedly must reflect lengthened o: (other Gk. _pous_ can derive from
*_pod-s_.  And the Germanic forms have generalized the o: form: Gothic
_fo:tus_, OE _fo:t_, OHG _fuoz_.  Meanwhile, Latin has _pe:s_, which could be
from either *_ped-s_ or *pe:d-s_.  Will that do?

>>> Pat differs:

>>> IE "pronouns" in every significant way look and act like nouns --- with
>>> the sole exception that the inflections seem to be more conservative.
>> ...
>>> Outside of a very few simple forms like *me, *te, *se, etc., which might
>>> slip in under the rubric of nominal, simple nominal and verbal CV-roots,
>>> which had wide semantic ranges, were *differentiated* by additional
>>> elements at a very early time --- at least in the languages from which IE
>>> derives.  If we are unwilling to look beyond IE, then we must say,
>>> principally, that the simplest nominal and verbal root-form is CVC.

>Leo responds:

>> But there you have it!  The IE pronouns neither look nor act like nouns!
>> Pushing it back to Nostratic doesn't change anything there, since you're
>> saying that they must have been different there too.

>Pat, hopefully not patronizingly:

>A pronoun is a pro-noun. It can be put in any position syntactically in
>which a noun can be employed. To say that pronouns do not "act like nouns"
>is completely unjustified!

Not so.  The morphology speaks for itself, so I'll do the syntax.  If they
could, you could say:

	*I want to meet the new her.
	*I want to meet secretary.
        *Poor he/him has to work on Saturday.

But you can't.  Neither can you use interrogative pronouns like nouns, or
demonstratives, or indefinites -- there are a great many things called
"pronouns", and they behave differently from nouns in *many* languages.

	No le veo.  'I don't see him.'   *No veo le.
	No veo a Carlos.  I don't see Charly.'   *No veo a le.

So no, pronouns need *not* have the syntax of nouns.  They act different.

Leo

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