LINGUIST List 2.780

Tue 12 Nov 1991

Disc: Clicks and R-Linking

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

  • Peter Ladefoged, clicks
  • Lars Henrik Mathiesen, R-Linking
  • Laurie Bauer, a apple

    Message 1: clicks

     Date: Tue, 12 Nov 91 08:02 PST
    From: Peter Ladefoged <IDU0PNLUCLAMVS.bitnet>
    Subject: clicks
    On clicks The only use of clicks I know of outside Africa is reported by Ken Hale and David Nash in a 1987 Australian Linguistics Society Paper "Lardil and Damin phonotactics." Damin is a derivative of Lardil, much like a language game, It is learned by adults and is not a first language. The odd thing about clicks is the ease with which they are borrowed. They occur in at least three different language families in ~AAfrica: Khoisan (e.g. !Xo), Bantu (e.g. Zulu, Xhosa) and Cushitic (Dahalo, spoken in Kenya), as well as in Sandawe and Hadza (spoken in East Africa) which may be Khoisan - nobody really knows. (We'll have to wait for a UCLA thesis by Bonny Sands to get more answers). Peter Ladefoged (idu0pnluclamvs.bitnet)

    Message 2: R-Linking

     Date: Thu, 7 Nov 91 20:39:59 +0100
    From: Lars Henrik Mathiesen <thorinndiku.dk>
    Subject: R-Linking
    The last round of the discussion, as I understood it: Question: What is ``linking R''. Answer (Stampe/Natural Phonology): It's an underlying R that is deleted in most positions. Objection (Manaster-Ramer): That doesn't explain why it is found only in dialects/languages that has lost R's in those positions. Natural Phonology owes us that explanation. That's where I disagree. Given the interpretation as underlying R, ``linking R'' is different from other cases of R-deletion only in a diachronic sense: it appears in words that didn't have an R before. It is this diachronic emergence in some words of an R that is realized in only a few positions that must be explained --- specifically, why that R emerges only in languages where other words already have it. To me, the phenomenon in English seems to be a classical case of analogy: The distinction between underlying V(:) and Vr is mostly lost, and the underlying R spreads in the lexicon. And I can't see that Natural Phonology has to explain why analogical spread occurs only when there is something to spread in the first place. (I'm not saying that there is nothing to explain about analogical processes, just that it's not NP's job.)

    Message 3: a apple

     Date: Thu, 07 Nov 1991 16:14:02 EST
    From: Laurie Bauer <bauerlmatai.vuw.ac.nz>
    Subject: a apple
    Lass reports somewhere that things like 'a apple' are heard in South African English, and they are certainly heard in New Zealand. It is my impression that they are usually accompanied by a glottal stop: a ?apple, but I don't know if this is always the case. Similarly, we find the apple with the same form of _the_ as we find in 'the banana', i.e. schwa vowel for both. Laurie Bauer