From: goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: EEK - DATA! (was Re: phonological constraints)
Date: 15 Sep 92 14:35:46 GMT
Reply-To: goer@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations

lee@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Greg Lee) writes:
>}...
>}..., phonological rules don't have to have access to
>}word-internal morphological structure. 
>}...
>
>The following is not a clear counterexample, but at least illustrates
>what one might look like.  Yawelmani lowers /i:/ /u:/ to [e:] [o:].
>This is due to a process/postlexical rule, since [e:] is not a phoneme.
>There is a class of verbs, ending in the morpheme /wiy/, whose vowels
>exceptionally fail to lower.  Thus, "after" the word is already formed,
>Lowering has to look inside it to see if it contains /wiy/, to find out
>whether it is permitted to apply.  That ought not to be possible.

It's always nice to see data.  Probably the first thing I'd do is check
to be *sure* that [e:] isn't at least a marginal phoneme.  It seems to
me that the phonemic/nonphonemic distinction is overblown, and that in
many cases, surface alternations are part-way to becoming reanalyzed as
morphophonemic.  In fact, in Classical Hebrew the e: has precisely this
same status.  Some people take it to be a phoneme.  Some, using more
abstract analyses, take it to be derived from either /ay/ or /i/, de-
pending on the environment.  Gregg, your education has clearly made you
a good "data" man.  I just want to use your posting to point out that
very often the halo that surrounds empirical proofs in theoretical posi-
tion papers is only an illusion.

On the question of whether processes/postlexical rules have access to
word-internal structures (e.g. morpheme class identity and extent), let
me try to adduce some data beyond what Gregg has tentatively cited in
his posting.

In Classical Hebrew there is a tendency to pronounce -CVCCV forms as
oxytones in connected speech.  In isolation, they always carry penultimate
stress.  This rule has become partially morphologized, in the sense that
it is blocked in perfect tense forms (as opposed to future "consecutives"):

    @ = schwa
    ' = glottal stop
    c = low back rounded vowel (turn the c around)

    w@'cmartc    'and he will say'   stress final
    w@'cmartc    'and he said'       stress penultimate

There is an ambiguity in the 'cmartc (i.e. verbal) portion of the above
forms.  The form in and of itself originally had no specific time value,
but rather took its time value from the surrounding context.  In most
cases, after the conjunction 'and' the form was used as part of a narra-
tive sequence of some kind, and in that case the form almost always had
a future meaning.  It was precisely this sort of form (used in a connec-
ted sequence) that tended to take on final stress.  This feature became
secondarily morphologized, and reanalyzed as an inherent feature of
these "future" forms.  Past-tense forms retain the original penultimate
stress pattern.  In biblical Hebrew, there exist many minimal pairs in
which stress is the only overt indication of any difference between the
past and future tenses of these forms.

What is key for the debate here is that the movement of stress to the
final syllable here was not "bumped up" to the lexical level.  It still
must follow many other rules.  Hebraists will recognize that these rules
include pretonic lengthening, Philippi's Law, etc.  It is also bled by
pausal vowel alternations, which many would argue are a low-level phe-
nomnenon (in Hebrew, pausal forms are usually taken to be "lengthened"
clause-final forms).  Final stress in w@'cmartc is also heavily influen-
ced by the surrounding context (e.g. the presence of a subsequent ini-
tially accented form) in a way that indicates that it still applies late
in the grammar.  Because the segmental structure of the future w@'cmartc
form is the same as its past counterpart, I infer that this low-level
stress movement process must have access to morphological information
about the word it accompanies.

How does this play into what has been said here about processes' access
to morphological information?  Anyone here who's published on Hebrew
want to dispute the analysis?

-- 

   -Richard L. Goerwitz              goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet
   goer@midway.uchicago.edu          rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer
Newsgroups: sci.lang.japan