[Lingtyp] query: 1st syllable deletion

[Riccardo Giomi]

 Dear David and all,

For what it's worth, I tend to agree with Randy and Christian. One possible
argument against a rule-based deletion/ellipsis account comes from central
varieties of Italian (including my own), and concerns, once again, emphatic
*wh-*questions -- suggesting a cross-linguistic pattern that, I suspect,
may also be found in other languages.

The "full" version of the type of question I have in mind makes use of the
emphatic element *cazzo *(slang for 'penis', but functionally largely
equivalent to English *fuck*), postponed to the clause-initial *wh-*word,
e.g.

- *Che cazzo fai? *'What the fuck are you doing?'

I often hear (and probably produce myself) "reduced" versions of similar
questions, including the following:

- *Cazzo fai?*
-* Azzo fai?*
*- Zzo fai?*

In the first case, it is only the first word and syllable *che *that would
be deleted; in the second, it's this word/syllable plus the onset of the
second syllable (which belongs to the second syntactic word); in the third
the first word/syllable plus the whole second syllable (i.e. the first
syllable of the second syntactic word). And I also recognize the forms *Zzo
vai? *and *Azzo vai? *for *Dove cazzo vai? *('Where the fuck are you
going?'), where the (by hypothesis) elided part consists of two and a half
and three syllables, respectively, again cutting across syntactic domains.

What this all suggests to me is that, if the correct explanation was indeed
one in term of deletion or ellipsis, then either it is a composite rule
that cuts across phonology and syntax, or it would be a merely phonological
rule allowing deletion of phonological strings that do not necessarily
coincide with syllables (which sounds kind of weird, at least for Italian),
and may stretch over three entire syllables (and maybe more, but this is
what I could think of for the moment). Rather than postulating such a
complex rule, which for more I don't think is found in any other type of
utterance in Italian, I find it much more economical and
psycholinguistically plausible (but the latter is of course quite a shot in
the dark) to assume that the point is precisely the omission of the
predictable elements from this specific type of emphatic question. The
constraint appears to be that only the most distinctive (and perceptually
salient) element, i.e. the second syllable of *cazzo*, must be retained for
the utterance-type in question to be easily identified.

Sorry for my stream of consciousness!

Best,
Riccardo

Randy J. LaPolla <randy.lapolla at gmail.com> escreveu no dia quarta,
2/11/2022 à(s) 13:35:

> Hi David,
> I don’t like the term “prodrop”, as it takes English, which is
> typologically actually the odd man out, as the norm, and all of the many
> languages that have not grammaticalised the grammatical mood constructions
> that require pronouns to be retained in English are seen as aberrant, but
> for languages that do not have such constructions, e.g. Chinese, the kind
> of pattern we have been talking about is the norm.
>
> All the best,
> Randy
>
>
> > On 2 Nov 2022, at 7:29 PM, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de> wrote:
> >
> > Randy,
> >
> > Thanks for your comment.  The last couple of days I've received a flurry
> of very helpful references and pointers concerning the phenomenon in
> question, which seem to point to it not being "a simple pragmatic
> phenomenon" of the kind you suggest.  Also, with the possible exception of
> a reference to German, nobody so far has offered examples of similar
> processes in other languages, and indeed, I can't think of anything like it
> in the other languages I am familiar with.
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > David
> >
> >
> > On 02/11/2022 12:33, Randy LaPolla wrote:
> >> Good question, David!
> >> Not a matter of phonetics or morphology, though.
> >> Possibly a simple pragmatic phenomenon where predictable elements,
> especially topics, can be left unspoken.
> >> Common in many languages.
> >> Not considered “grammatical” in English, but maybe English is changing.
> >>
> >> Randy
> >>
> > --
> > David Gil
> >
> > Senior Scientist (Associate)
> > Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
> > Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
> > Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany
> >
> > Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
> > Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
> > Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-082113720302
> >
>
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-- 
Riccardo Giomi, Ph.D.
University of Liège
Département de langues modernes : linguistique, littérature et traduction
Research group *Linguistique contrastive et typologie des langues*
F.R.S.-FNRS Postdoctoral fellow (CR - FC 43095)
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