Summary Details
| Query: |
Summary: VVCC superheavy syllable
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| Author: | Andrew Horne | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Morphology
Phonology |
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| Summary: |
Two weeks ago (Linguist 14.1796) I posted a question requesting
information on langauges which have underlying VVCC superheavy syllables in monomorphemic forms. The responses were extremely helpful and I would like to thank the following persons who responded to my query: Edward Vajda (EV) S?ren Wichmann (SW) Charles E. Cairns (CEC) John Phillips (JP) Yuni Kim (YK) Michael Johnstone (MJ) Willem Visser (WV) Katalin Balogne Berces (KBB) Question: I am looking for languages with morphologically simplex superheavy syllables of the format VVCC e.g. English bold, find etc. This structure appears to be extremely rare cross-linguistically and many apparent cases turn out to involve either morphological boundaries (as in dine-d) or alternating epenthetic forms i.e. (arguably) an underlying VVCVC structure e,g. Somali maalim day, maalm-o days. I would be grateful for information on any languages which have (underlying) VVCC superheavies and for which, ideally, data is readily available. I am particularly interested in any correspondence between the occurrence of such forms and phonetically identical morphologically complex forms e.g. English bold v. bowl-ed; find v. fine-d etc. EV: I am a specialist of the Ket language isolate spoken in Central SiberiaKet phonology does resemble English in having such codas as you describe. While there are no morphological word-initial or even morpheme initial consonant clusters allowed in Ket, there are many words (and monomorphemic words) that do end with two consonants there are quite a number of monomorphemic Ket monosyllables that have a rhyme containing a superheavy coda followed by geminate or a half-long vowel (Ket is tonal, and the three vowel types: regular, half-long, geminate are actually non-melodic concomitants to the tone -- I wrote all this up in a short monograph ''Ket prosodic phonology'' published by Lincom Europa. Anyway, here is an example: biilt 'with rising falling tone on the geminate /i/. This word means 'sand martin' (at type of riverbank-nesting bird in Central Siberia). There is no way of showing that the final /t/ is or ever was a separate morpheme. My full-length Lincom Europa grammar of Ket is is the process of being written. I would be happy to send you pdf files of the phonology section if this would help answer questions (though unfortunately I myself didn't pose any special questions regarding coda structure). SW: concerning your inquiry on Linguist, in the Mixean subgroup of Mixe-Zoquean languages you will find languages that have the ''superheavy'' syllables. In my book The Relationship among the Mixe-Zoquean Languages of Mexico (University of Utah Press, 1995) there are synchronic as well as diachronic descriptions (if it is not in a library near you there are $10 offers on the internet). The majority of diachronic phonological developments in the family relate to quantity--either of the syllable nucleus or the final consonants. In some Mixean dialects length is reduced before clusters of consonants, but one also finds extra-heavy syllables emerging or reemerging as a result of disyllables loosing their second vowel. The book has tons of data, so you should be able to find something useful there. CEC: In the case of English, I am convinced that in fact in words like those you cite that the segments that make the syllable appear ''superheavy'' are in fact not part of a syllable at all. Either they are directly dependent on the Prosodic Word, or they are ''extra metrical'' in a Hallean sense. My reasons are that, word internally, -VV or -VC seem to be the maximal size of the rhyme (see Borowsky's work from the late 1980s); the only counterexamples are a few words like ''council,'' where the segment that makes the syllable appear longer than -VX is always a nasal homorganic to the following stop. JP: You'll find plenty of these in Welsh, e.g. Aifft (Egypt) enghraifft (an example) aillt (a serf) cainc (a tune) braint (priviledge) sawdl (heel) llawdr (a pair of trousers) dieithr (strange) meistr (master) meirw (dead) meirch (horses) beirdd (poets) (The last 3 are plurals formed by vowel alternation, like English foot-feet.) It should be easy enough to find or make morphologically complex forms with the same consonant clusters, e.g. blawdlyd (floury) from blawd (flour) + -llyd (-y); llawdrwm (heavy-handed) from llaw (hand) + trwm (heavy). Some of the examples above came to mind immediately, others I found flicking through a rhyming dictionary, Roy Stephens: Yr Odliadur, Gwasg Gomer 1978. YK: I saw your posting on the Linguist List and thought I would write to you about a dialect of Finland-Swedish I'm working on, which has superheavy syllables in both monomorphemic and multimorphemic words. The dialect is East Nyland Swedish (ENS), spoken along the southern coast of Finland east of Helsinki. There are two kinds of VVCC syllables. The first type is long vowel + consonant cluster. /la:mb/ 'lamb' /ha:nd/ 'hand' /bry:st/ 'breast' /ru:nst-krank/ (compound word; adjective referring to hip deformity) Standard Swedish has this syllable type also, in words like /mo:ln/ 'cloud', although it's rarer than in ENS (the example words here have short vowels in Standard Swedish). This type seems to behave as regular-heavy, rather than superheavy (as far as I know nongeminate coda consonants don't contribute to syllable weight in Swedish). Also, many dialects that have these VVCCs don't allow ''real'' superheavy syllables, which can be defined as long vowel + geminate consonant. ENS has long vowel + geminate syllables (also diphthong + geminate). In monomorphemes: /tve:tt/ 'to wash', inf. -- alternates with /tve:tta/ /ly:ss/ 'to listen' /tr?:ttog-?r/ 'tired' /sveittog-?r/ 'sweaty' (not sure how the morphology works on these last two) ..Two possible sources on Scandinavian are Arnason (1980) 'Quantity in phonological theory' and Riad (1992) 'Structures in Germanic prosody'. For Finland-Swedish dialects (ENS is not the only one with superheavy syllables), Kiparsky has a paper on his webpage. MJ: I haven't sat and thought in depth about this, but Hungarian seems to have plenty of VVCC syllables with long vowels (phonologically, I'd argue that Hungarian doesn't have diphthongs). For example, e'szt /e:st/ 'Estonian' cf. ve'szt /ve:s+t/ 'disaster'+ACC ke'nt /ke:nt/ 'as' cf. ke'nt /ke:n+t/ 'sulphur'+ACC ime'nt /ime:nt/ 'just now' (quite a few adverbs end with -e'nt or -int. I'm not sure of the origin, but may well be a combination of suffixes, historically.) sa'nc /Sa:nts/ 'earthwork' (loanword, cf. German Schanze) aja'nl /aja:nl/ 'recommend' (the only word I know of ending with /nl/) e'rv /e:rv/ 'argument' o'zd /o:zd/ 'name of a town' pe'nz /pe:nz/ 'money' ta'rs /ta:rS/ 'companion' se'rv /Se:rv/ 'hernia' (but se'r- 'injure' exists as a bound morpheme) keno~cs /ken?:tS/ 'ointment' (though /tS/ counts as a single phoneme) fogo'dzkodik /fog+o:dz+kod+ik/ 'cling onto' WV: I think (West) Frisian, my mother tongue, might be of interest to you. Frisian is a West germanic language, spoken by about 450,000 of the 600,000 inhabitants of Frysl?n/Friesland, a province in the North West of the Netherlands. In section 2.2.5 (The shape of the rhyme) of the second chapter of my doctoral dissertation, I listed all words I was able to find with underlying fourpositional rhymes, i.e. not only VVCC but also VCCC. Most of these end in a coronal segment, as expected, but here are also some ending in a dorsal one. I give you the full reference: Willem Visser, The Syllable in Frisian (Hill Dissertations; 30), The Hague, 1997, ISBN: 90-5569-030-9 KBB: The Hungarian vowel inventory consists of the following vowels: /a, e, i, o, ?, u, ?/, and each has a long counterpart. However, with a few exceptions (e.g. _t[o:s]t_ 'toast'), tautomorphemic superheavy syllables can only contain /a:/ or /e:/, as in _f[e:]rc_ 'tack', _m[a:]rt_ 'dip'. There are apparent counterexamples with [i:, u:, ?:, ?:], but (i) there's few of them, (ii) these vowels are usually shortened. What is interesting is the fact that these 2 ''misbehaving'' vowels, /a:, e:/, are the ones whose short and long counterparts considerably differ phonetically. Short /e/ is open-mid whereas long /e:/ is close-mid, short /a/ is back whereas long /a:/ is front/central. For more information, I can refer you to Peter Siptar and Miklos Torkenczy, The Phonology of Hungarian (in the Phonology of the World's Languages series). Thanks again to everyone. Andrew Horne Graduate student SOAS |
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| LL Issue: | 14.1916 | |
| Date Posted: | 13-Jul-2003 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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