Xref: utzoo sci.lang:4601 comp.cog-eng:1147 sci.psychology:1976
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!uwvax!tank!sophist!goer
From: goer@sophist.uucp (Richard Goerwitz)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.cog-eng,sci.psychology
Subject: Re: Regional accents (was: Spelling and Perceptual Mode)
Keywords: GB Shaw, orthography
Message-ID: <3413@tank.uchicago.edu>
Date: 24 May 89 00:49:01 GMT
References: <2763@puff.cs.wisc.edu> <60340@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> <11726@bcsaic.UUCP> <5@minya.UUCP> <3368@tank.uchicago.edu> <18156@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu>
Sender: news@tank.uchicago.edu
Reply-To: goer@sophist.UUCP (Richard Goerwitz)
Distribution: na
Organization: University of Chicago
Lines: 150

John M. Allen writes:
>>                               How do we know that "bar" and "barring"
>>represent divergent hypostases of a single underlying form (in the
>>Platonic sense)?  Why not have speakers simply lexicalize the relation-
>>ship?
>
>   There are several reasons that a single common base form is
>prefered over several forms related by rules, but the most important
>one is memory size....
>[If] you store all possible forms that a word might have the memory load is
>dramatically increased because each morpheme may have several
>different morphophonemic shapes.

Same old stuff I've been hearing.  You assume that Ockham's razor applies
in a straightforward way to the very elusive processes of the human mind.
Sure, it works out nice for your theories, but does it in fact reflect the
underlying psychological reality?

>   Consider the following data from Russian verbs... (examples deleted).
>
>As you can see with only four words, the lexical approach takes more
>space than derivations from a base.  Furthermore, every Russian verb
>has as least two different morphophonemic shape under this analysis,
>so the difference will continue to increase as you add more verbs to
>the lexicon....

>   Finally, lexicalized items tend to resist change.  If every word
>had all of its forms lexicalized, then we would expect many more
>exceptions to the morphophonemic rules than there are.  The rule based
>approach simply changes the rule in the appropriate way.

Let's get into the question of how one might relate sets of forms.  Say
we have the word (taken from biblical Hebrew, * = attested in older
dialects preserved in Greek, Latin, or Akkadian transcription; the verb
itself does not occur in this precise form - it is a junk form Semitists
use to elucidate the CV pattern characteristic of the so-called Dt
stem):

         *hithpa``alu: (`=voiced pharyng. fric.; th = voiced interdent. fric.)

Now say that we have two forms of this verb.  One is clause-final (a)
and one is clause medial (b).  The tonic syllable in the clause-final
form, if open and short, is lengthened (i.e. the feature +short is neu-
tralized in open, "pausally" stressed syllables):

         a) hithpa``a:lu:  (paroxytone)
         b) *hithpa``alu:  (paroxytone)

Both of these forms are accented on the penult.

Now what if we have an accent shift in forms with a final long vowel
(V:# whose penult is open and short):

         a) hithpa``a:lu: (still paroxytone)
         b) hithpa``alu:  (now oxytone)

And then we get our pretonic a in form (a) going to shewa, and our
tonic /a:/ in (a) going to a low back rounded vowel (the language
is shifting to stress timing, and is losing length distinctions).
Labialization and development of a shewa are natural offshoots thereof.
The result is a pausal form (a) that differs dramatically from its
nonpausal (i.e. clause-medial) counterpart:

         a) hithpa``clu  (c = low back rounded vowel)
         b) hithpa``@lu  (@ = shewa)

I'm not kidding, by the way, this all really happened.  As I mentioned
above, we have Greek, Latin, Akkadian transcriptions, as well as sup-
porting evidence from cognate dialects.  The last two forms are what
is attested in biblical Hebrew.

Generative treatments of Hebrew analyze these two forms, (a) and
(b), as underlyingly the same.  To get from an abstract form to
its realization is very, very complicated.  I would refer you, for
instance, to several MIT theses on this subject (Prince, Rappaport,
McCarthy). 

Now here's the catch:  Words fall into patterns.  So if we simply
have a rule that the hithpa``@lu pattern goes to hithpa``clu in
pause, we cover many, many similar verbs in Hebrew.  In fact, it
is much simpler to lexicalize the PATTERNS here than to bother re-
capitulating synchronically the diachronic changes 1) pausal lengthening,
2) accent shift, 3) labialization of /a:/, 4) a -> @ / C_[-stress]CV,
which would be necessary if we were to adopt the theory of an under-
lyingly common, Platonic "form."  Ultimately, it is easier for the
speaker to simply follow a simple conversion rule than to work off of
a common form.

As for the psychological reality of the conversion rule (and the im-
plied lack of a common form), I would point to certain wonderfully
revealing cases of analogy.  The verb shown above has the singular

       c) hithpa``el

Recall that the form given above went *hithpa``alu:.  This is actually
a plural form, with the masculine plural morpheme -u tacked onto the
end.  The preceding vowel is an /a/.  This is in fact what we would ex-]
pect in the singular -

       c) *hithpa``al  (attested in older transcriptions)

Clearly some sort of shift has occurred.  However, it has no parallels
elsewhere in the language.  In fact, the expected trend is towards low-
ering of stressed, high vowels.  What is going on here?

The answer is that the so-called D-stem has become the model on which
a new Dt-stem has begun to be pronounced:

       d) pa``el (D-stem)
       c) hithpa``el (new Dt-stem [originally a passive/reflexive of the D]) 

The interesting thing here is that the pausal form retains its historical
vowel:

       e) hithpa``cl (c = low back rounded vowel < /a:/ < stressed /a/)

Why, if we have a single, underlying form, do we have re-patterning with the
context form, and not with its pausal counterpart.  The pa``el pattern has
a pausal form of its own (which in this instance looks like the context form,
but sometimes differs).

What I am getting at is that in Hebrew, it appears that native speakers had
no concept of an abstraction unifying context forms with their pausal counter-
parts.  Hence you could have analogy with the one without involving the other.

In broader terms, one might observe that Semitic languages generally are
very patterned, in the sense of having a fairly limited and predictable
set of nominal and verbal patterns.  In these languages it is much simpler
to derive corresponding plural/singular, passive/active, pausal/context
etc. forms by simple pattern-replacement rules.  To derive them from under-
lying common forms is much more complicated, especially in cases where the
language in question has become stress-timed (Hebrew, Aramaic). 

The point I personally have gleaned from all of this is that the generative
model is not a universal theory (big suprise).  It may be valid for some
languages, and for some parts of other languages.  It may also coexist with
other strategies.  No one ever said that people were consistent (except may-
be economists and linguists - both guilty of practicing "pseudo-science").
No one ever said that Plato (or as some would have it, Descartes) was right.
But then no one ever said Aristotle was right, either.

From my limited standpoint, it appears that generative grammar is really
just another incarnation of the "God's truth" school of linguistics - one
theoretical extreme in an infinitely varied and probably ultimately indes-
cribable spectrum of strategies we human beings might possible use to com-
municate verbally.

                                       -Richard L. Goerwitz
                                       goer@sophist.uchicago.edu
                                       rutgers!oddjob!gide!sophist!goer