LINGUIST List 4.299

Sun 25 Apr 1993

Qs: Infixes, Rhyming slang, taps, sex of linguists

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Directory

1. Spencer A J, Suffixing infixes
2. , cockney rhyming slang
3. "Tom Lai, City Polytechnic of Hong Kong"CTTOMLAIcphkvx.cphk.hk, Taps and Flaps
4. RichardHudson50, Sex and linguists

Infixes always seem to be found as prefixes rather than
suffixes. Thus, it is common to find languages in which um +
sulat ===> s-um-ulat, but I can't think of any language in
which talus + mu ===> talu-mu-s.

Do such cases exist?


Andrew Spencer

Department of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
Colchester CO4 3SQ
U.K.

spenaessex.ac.uk

I am working with a student who is planning a field project on
Cockney Rhyming Slang. The library search has resulted in few
sources and most of them quite old. Any suggestions?
Please reply to me directly. Thanks very much.

Rebecca Burns-Hoffman

Joe Stemberger wrote in a recent posting:

>While reading the most recent book by James Herriot, in which he
>frequently uses non-standard spellings to give the flavor of Yorkshire
>speech, I came across this:

> spelling: gerrim for: get him

>I assume that the {rr} spelling here represents the tap that British
>dialects have for intervocalic /r/. But it's not for /r/ here, but for
>an alveolar stop.

This prompts me to ask a question:

If one distinguishes between a flap (as an articulatory gesture) and a
tap (a very short stop) as in Clark and Yallop (1990), then is
intervocalic /r/ in some varieties of English a flap or a tap? (Or are both
attested?) Put another way, my question is whether /r/ (in English as well
as in other languages of the world) can be realized as taps besides trills,
flaps and approximants.

Tom Lai
Hong Kong

Actually, `sex *of* linguists'. Gillian Sankoff has just pointed out to me
that I shouldn't have quoted the raw figures for male vs female responses
to my message about rude negators as though they showed something significant
about male vs female interest in the subject. It all depends what the
normal balance is among contributors to Linguist. True I found a 5:1 ratio
of male:female, but maybe this is the normal ratio and not worth commenting
on. Sorry.
Does anyone have any idea what the normal ratio might be? Or what it is among
linguists as a whole (e.g. among members of LSA)? I tried to count a few pages
of the LSA membership list but gave up because so many people were
 unclassifiable
(on the basis of their names alone).

Dick Hudson
Dept of Phonetics and Linguistics,
University College London,
Gower Street,
London WC1E 6BT
(071) 387 7050 ext 3152