From: JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU
Subject: Re: What is a syllable?
    <168931214B.JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU> <1992Nov4.000726.44376@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>
Organization: University of Kentucky
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 02:16:12 GMT

In article <1992Nov4.000726.44376@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>
miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>
>In article <168931214B.JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU>, JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU writes:
>> In article <1992Oct31.194009.44286@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>
>> miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>
Sorry to have taken so long to try to clear up my poorly stated post.
I've been out of town, and am on my way out again, trying to catch up on
such mail as may disappear before my return, and simultaneously reacting
to a Dean who has decided that "restructuring" means eliminating the
Linguistics Program at U of Ky.  He admits that no salary money will be
saved, no secretarial savings accomplished, and no office space changed.
Deans work a mysterious way their wonders to perform.  Anyway.
 
>I assume the devoicing of the /l/ in this form (and of the /r/ in
>similar forms ending in /r/) is predictable and therefore the result
>of a rule or process, since I don't know of any languages which have
>underlyingly voiceless lateral and rhotic approximants; if
>syllabification takes place after this devoicing rule applies then
>yes, I would say French "table" has one syllable.
 
This is, of course one of the points I was trying to tease out:  are all of
those in this group willing to work with an abstract phonology, in which
"syllabification rules"  apply before rules that devoice?  If so fine, but
this was not openly stated, and it was thus not made clear that we were not
using "surface" structure throughout.
 
>> I read this to imply that nasals are "voiced" continuants (and perhaps also
>> liquids).  Do we all concur?
>
>Well, I do.  I take the liquids & nasals in the hierarchy to be voiced.
>I don't know where voiceless approximants come in anybody's sonority
>hierarchy.  I doubt that they come anywhere because their
>voicelessness will almost surely be the result of a process and
>syllabification can perhaps be posited to take place before the
>process of devoicing applies, so that a sonority hierarchy would not
>have to include them.
 
This is what I meant by acknowledging that I had not made myself clear.  I
was not taking issue with the voicing, but rather with calling nasals
"continuants".  Most who espouse process phonology count them as stops.
There is likewise disagreement on /l/, which has mid-saggital closure.
>
>Further, I read it as merely citing "l, r" as
>> examples of liquids, not as exhaustive; are the voiceless lateral affricates
>> of, say, Welsh and Sassarese included as laterals at that level of the
>> sonority hierarchy?
>
>I don't know about Sassarese but the Welsh sound in question is not a
>lateral voiceless approximant but a voiceless lateral *fricative* and
>I assume it would occupy the same place in a sonority hierarchy as
>other voiceless fricatives.
>>
Here again, I was taking issue with a "hierarchy" which, as stated, claimed
all laterals were at that level of sonority, and failing to account for
languages with lateral affricates and fricatives.  By the by, I would not
have called /l/ an "approximant", since it involves closure.  Again, I'm
sorry to have stated some of this unclearly (perhaps still so in my haste).
 
The hierarchy as stated in the earlier post (by whomever) was, as is so often
the case, not fully enough elaborated to avoid quibbles like mine.
 
>-Ken <miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> {Sometimes you have to look reality straight
> OPINIONS ARE MY OWN            {in the eye, and deny it. - G. Keillor
>
>