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HUMnet.UCLA.EDU>Actually, I've been content to enjoy the exchanges on this topic as an innocent bystander -- but I thought it might be of wider interest to share a passage I just happened to come across in a letter called "A Plea for Speech Nationalisation" sent to the 'Morning Leader' on 16 August 1901 by George Bernard Shaw (you might call me a slow reader): ...Mr. Archer supposes practical phonetics are impossibly complex and difficult. That is a novice's notion. The subtle differences [BW: wait for them below!] of which Mr. Archer is thinking do not trouble experts at all: there may be six-and-thirty ways of saying 'get' (and 'every single one of them is right'), just as there may be six-and-thirty ways of saying 'git' (and every single one of them is wrong); but that does not in the slightest degree complicate the simple process of teaching a child to say get instead of git.... So the issue is a lot older than some may have supposed. On the other hand, the problem is a bit more difficult than GBS supposed (though not necessarily for a phonetician, perhaps more for somebody trying to understand the reductivism and normalisation processes involved in human cognition). Of course, GBS is simply picking a number out of nowhere (I suppose from this Archer guy) in saying "36" ways, instead of an "infinite" number, but he's still right about it's not hard to teach a child the difference. It would, however, be harder to teach a child the difference between 'pin' and 'pen' -- if that child has already acquired the merger. For those who aren't familiar with nonstandard English, 'git' is a nonstandard pronunciation of 'get' but is strictly a lexical idiosyncrasy, quite independent of any merger of /i/ and /e/ as phonemes (while merger of 'pin' and 'pen' is indicative of merger of the "same" two phonemes before nasals, a recurrent event in the history of English and its ancestors). In any case, GBS, and perhaps some later discussants, are misleading, at least when it comes to vowels, in supposing that the distinction between 'git' and 'get' is *always* clear. That depends on an unoccupied area of vowel space in between them in any actual sound system (which distinguishes two phonemes comparable to English /i/ and /e/). Phoneticians have long been aware that vowels are perceived "continuously", not discretely, even though phonemes are supposed to "always" be discrete (i.e., the phonemes of which phoneticians study the allophones). That means that if there is no gap between the spaces of the /i/ and /e/ phonemes, then there will indeed be an in-between area which speakers will inconsistently identify with either /i/ or /e/. In fairness to GBS, I must acknowledge that he was not concerned with such problems (and his admiration for phoneticians knew no bounds, as his play "Pygmalion" indicates). He wrote the above cited passage in the context of his favorite practical concern, orthographic reform. Basically, he was arguing that a "phonetic" spelling was necessary for various reasons, not least of all to give "cockney" speakers access to the prestige variety of English (by the notion that if people wrote and learned to read phonetically they would have access to each other's pronunciations). Whether this is a sound (get it?) notion or not is quite interesting, but belongs to another ungoing discussion, the one labelled "Written Creole". - BenjiMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
ext.jussieu.fr>Richard D. Janda [LINGUIST List: Vol-10-1785. Tue Nov 23 1999] writes: >As for the issue of coarticulation vs. complementary distribution, the add- >ed notion of physiological inevitability strikes me as a red herring, if not a >red blue-whale. There are plenty of traditional allophones (allophones as >traditionally analyzed) which are in complementary distribution but do not re- >sult from coarticulation: e.g., the aspirated realization of English /p/ >which occurs initially in stressed syllables, as opposed to the unreleased >word-final variant which tends to close, say, _yep_ and _nope_. This is not true. If aspiration (as well as voice) is to be defined in terms of voice onset time within the C/V transition, it does result from (CV-)coarticulation: C-voicelessness continues after the vowel release; the final plosive is not aspirated because there is no vowel at its right, and therefore no possibility of coarticulation. >Thus, without arguing >>that this is an ironclad characterization, I would suggest that complementary >>distribution, assimilation, & coarticulation are a set of increasingly >>specific terms which seem to involve proper inclusion, although they may >>turn out not to be quite so neatly related. I don't mean that all cases of complementary distribution imply coarticulation, though I'd like to suppose it. But, honestly, I confess I can't find a really good example of context-sensitive allophonic alternance that could be described without reference to some sort of assimilation. Joaquim Brandao de Carvalho 1, rue Henri Poincare 75020 Paris France Tel./fax : 01 43 64 34 18 (If calling from outside France, please replace the prefix '01' with '331'.) Departement de linguistique Faculte des Sciences Humaines et Sociales - Sorbonne Universite Rene Descartes - Paris V CNRS : ESA 7018, GDR 1954 jbrandaoMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
usc.es>>OR MAYBE the graduate >students of the last 20-30 years have not been required, in the full-blown >Chomskyan era which disparages all foundational structuralist work done >before, to read the books and articles which shaped linguistics. >Call me retro, but I refuse to see a relation as a thing like phones and >phonemes. I come from an european structural tradition (Coseriu, Martinet, Trubetzkoy). I have read generative linguistic only when I finished my course, and for me, an allophone is a thing, an abstract thing. Francisco Dubert Garc�a Departamento de Filolox�a Galega Universidade de Santiago de Compostela Santiago de Compostela Espa�a e-mail: fgdubertMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue
siu.buap.mx>On Wed, 1 Dec 1999, Dan Moonhawk Alford <dalfordMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue