LINGUIST List 2.260

Thursday, 30 May 1991

Disc: Pronoun Doubling, Hyouston

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Directory

1. bert peeters, Pronoun doubling in Flemish dialects
2. Guido Vanden Wyngaerd, Pronoun Doubling
3. , Re: Hyouston
4. "Norval Smith, RE: Hyouston

Dirk Geeraerts questions my hypothesis that clitic/unaccented 'de' in 'hedde
gij' is a reduction of a pronoun formally identical to the one that follows.
He quotes diachronical evidence to support his argument.
Now, this is of course a legitimate approach. But what is it that we are
interested in? Do we want to propose analyses that are historically correct
or do we want to emit hypotheses that make sense to the speaker of a Flemish
dialect anno 1991? I was trying to do the latter, and I do believe we should
not mix synchrony and diachrony in this kind of matters.
Bert Peeters <peeterstasman.cc.utas.edu.au>

Some more references for those interested in pronoun doubling
in Flemish dialects:

1. Bennis, H. and L. Haegeman (1984) "On the status of agreement and
relative clauses in West-Flemish", in W. de Geest and Y. Putseys,
eds., Sentential Complementation, Foris, Dordrecht.

2. Haegeman, L. (1990) "Subject Pronouns and Subject Clitics in West-
Flemish," The Linguistic Review, 7, 333-363.

3. W. de Geest (1990) "Universele Grammatica op de Gentse toer,"
Taal en Tongval XLII, 108-124.

(1) and (2) also contain some discussion of complementizer agreement
phenomena.

-Guido Vanden Wyngaerd

Dare a non-linguist make a suggestion to a linguist on the
_reporting_ of data? He dares. I assure Cynthia Bernstein,
word of honor, that for a sample of 910 (or 91000 as far as
NON-statistical significance goes) rounding the percentages 
to a whole number (78%, 11%, 11%) would only add to the value
of what's being communicated.

Norman Miller

Houston

The funny thing is that the place that is ultimately the source of the name
Houston - whether the place in Texas gets its name from Sam Houston or not -
Houston in Renfrewshire, Scotland, is pronounced [hustn].
It is a Scots name, hoose (i.e. "house") + toon > tn (i.e. "town" (actually
rather "settlement")).

Norval Smith

[End Linguist List, Vol. 2, No. 260]