Stumbling over and through Drink Wisconsinbly

Earlier this year, I started noticing t-shirts and hoodies bearing the phrase 'Drink Wisconsinbly', like in the image here. (And, yeah, it comes in green and gold as well as red and white.) Clever, right? But I don't read t-shirts all that closely and I saw it a few times before I realized that it doesn't work at all for me phonologically ... Wisconsably, yes, and Wisconsinably, I suppose, but not Wisconsinbly. I stumble over it every time, dead cold sober.

I'm seeing more and more of these shirts and hats (including the obligatory camo hat) and it now turn out that there's, of course, a website, http://drinkwisconsinbly.com/. "Proud home of the greatest drinking culture this fine nation has ever known." Cute, but I'm not sure that "We lacked an official call to arms" when it comes to drinking.

Looks like this thing is probably sponsored by the Tavern League of Wisconsin. If so, that may complicate the feel-good thing for some people ... among other things, the TLW is seen as keeping our drinking and driving laws lax, see here.

Morris Halle: still in ur field pwning ur theories

To launch a series on their emeritus faculty, MIT News has a piece on Morris Halle, widely regarded as the key figure in the development of modern phonological theory.

University propaganda ministries (as I've heard an employee of one refer to such operations) churn out tons of feel-good stuff about their great faculty, but Halle is vastly beyond that status. I think the article basically does him justice, and it has some real substance. In particular, there's a lot about Donca Steriade in the piece, a former student of Halle's now back at MIT.

Two years ago, a lot of virtual ink was spilled in posts on this blog about 'opacity' (start here and work back). The core issue here is whether phonology is derivational, involving a set of discrete steps, or can be done in a single step. Halle was central to developing the derivational view and Optimality Theory (OT) provided the monostratal challenge. Steriade didn't found OT, but she certainly helped lead the fight against the traditional view. Here's what she is quoted as saying in the article:

We may indeed run though a sequence of computations while turning underlying words into sounds, she suggests, so in this regard, while optimality theorists “hoped they were going to eliminate the view Morris has, it’s become obvious that’s not possible.”

She's hardly the first to concede the point, but this is the most direct admission I've seen. But Steriade …

believes there is still a “fundamental conceptual difference” between the views. While Halle describes words becoming sounds through a more arbitrary, ad-hoc series of conventions that evolve in a given language, Optimality Theory asserts that the conflicting preferences that apply to pronunciation are not arbitrary at all.

I don't have time to unpack that point right now, but will try to get back to it later. But maybe this post (or its title) will provoke some reaction.

Furlough update: Optimality Theorists singled out

That was a page 1 headline in the Wisconsin State Journal print edition this morning. (The online version of course would have to have a different title.)

Bad phonology jokes aside, it shows again the absurdity of the way furloughs are being handled in Wisconsin: People are furloughed as a kind of temporary pay cut, then the same people are paid time and a half to cover the necessary shifts.

The lego blocks of language: Hurrah for Talking Brains

It's been a while, I guess, since we had the lowliest of all post types, the 'hey, I found something cool on another blog' post, but somebody called my attention yesterday to this post called "Speech: Not enough distinctions are being made" over at Talking Brains, specifically aimed at treatments of spoken language processing. Those guys are good.

We've got a suddenly thriving group of sound people here on campus, and I have to call them 'sound people' because they include not only phonologists and phoneticians, but engineers and stats people and who knows who all. Some of them have been discussing the 'false parsimony' of linguistic theory lately, a kind of Occam meets slasher flick approach to understanding language. Talking Brains seems (seem? No.) to be on the same wavelength there.

Image from here, and aside from the nice graphic, it's worth visiting just to read 'legolicious' used in context.

Syllabification watch

A contributor has just passed along this note from what he described as an observant young person, sent with the subject line 'annoyed':

i was like, other than obvious reasons, why does this headline bother me?

http://current.com/items/89278834_newsweek_cover_palin_tol_ogy

and then i thought, oh odd choice for syllable breaks ...

I'm with you, young person, in your annoyance.

The paleontology ~ Palintology pun might have worked the first couple of times I'd heard it, if the press was actually digging deeper and more carefully. Sure, she's mired in a set of scandals, but how dirty do you think she really is, if you scrape off the makeup and hype? Well, the Obama memo seems to suggest how it would look.

Then I got the point: It's hyphenation breaks, not syllable structure! But why the heck use that? To create the sense of a dictionary entry? Doesn't quite work, does it? Help me out, dear readers.

Image from here.

Theory Wars: Phonology

The opacity posts haven't apparently completely killed readership on this blog (yet?), to my amazement, but that business is winding down. Eric B. has posted his wrap-up at Phonoloblog, a snappily titled "Hold your theory still so I can stomp on it, OK?" If PhonoGore is your thing, you'll want to tix for that show. I'd advise wearing Doc Martens or maybe Larry Mahans.

Several people have indicated (by email, in person and even on the web) that they found the discussion useful or interesting, and a couple said specifically that they've been bothered by the lack of such exchanges in the field, so that it's a welcome engagement across a theoretical divide. I'm not sure about any of that right now. If such debates are to take place here in the future, I'm going to lay down some groundrules and organize things. But I hope that doesn't come up for a while.

By the way, I'm not sure of Cassady Rasmussen's identity either, but I've assumed that this Cassady is a she, with some reason.

Challenge IV: The big picture

No, the picture doesn't mean what you think. Just hold on a second.

"Finish what you start." That’s what the old men always told us when I was little. I feel compelled to check off Challenge IV in this Quixotic quest:

4. The benefits of OT over SPE “don’t look all that great”.

This one triggered the first nastiness, the quip that it “requires a lot of (willful) ignorance of a huge amount of important work”.

As far as I know, everyone, even outsiders to the theory wars like me, agrees that phonology in the late 1980s needed major reworking, and everyone agrees that constraint-based work has provided real insights. Of the list that Eric gives, conspiracies stand out as the big example for me.

But the complaint you can hear from people who've grown disillusioned with OT (or never accepted it) is that a huge amount of the work in the framework has tended to theory-internal tinkering, rather than research aimed at more general progress on how sounds work. The failure to deal adequately with opacity, for such people, is symptomatic of that. I've been surprised at how many people say such things. One of the best-known phonologists around has apparently bemoaned the failure of OT to produce “deep descriptions of languages”. And others (though not all) have the sense — again, this is reporting something I've heard — that while OT works well for higher-level prosodic stuff, like reduplication, it stumbles too often on issues of segmental phonology that traditional approaches handled easily. So, I think every non-OTer I know sees OT as having brought valuable discussion and progress, but the question of just how much has remained virtually untouched.

Now we get to the image above: Many of us outsiders smelled a troubling air of triumphalism in OT's salad days. I remember vividly hearing young phonologists — people who had and probably still have contributed little or nothing to the field — mocking Kiparsky for pursuing stratal OT.

But we are finally seeing a change. It's good to see Eric sounding so positive about Kiparsky's and Bermúdez-Otero's stratal work (see Challenge I). McCarthy's embrace of Harmonic Serialism will be a positive move to many. Eric's own Phonology piece grapples directly with comparing traditional approaches to opacity with OT approaches, acknowledging some strengths of the former. Maybe we're seeing some rapprochement, and with it more discussion of the grounding of phonological theory, instead of talking-heads-style yelling and posturing. The shocking part, of course, is how rare this has been of late — or so it seems to me. Hell, if it continues, I might do a little phonology some day.

Anyway, I'll post again later to clear up some lingering questions.


Challenge IV
Frankly, this one’s a real puzzler to me. In my view, it requires a lot of (willful) ignorance of a huge amount of important work in the 70s and 80s to think that OT doesn’t make significant progress in many areas (duplication, conspiracies, top-down and bottom-up effects, the emergence of the unmarked, …) where SPE essentially foundered. Yes, one significant consequence of all this progress was at the very least a re-evaluation of the ubiquity, diversity, and explanatory analysis of opacity — and this re-evaluation has led to a lot of interesting work and new developments. Some of it may involve what some consider to be “lots of gymnastics”, but as I’ve noted above, similar (and well-accepted) developments in SPE are arguably no different in this regard.

Opacity, part III: What's 'easy'?

After a hiatus to take care of other business and read his recent Phonology paper, here are a few notes on Eric's third challenge (again full text at the bottom of the post):

3. SPE(-and-subsequent-developments) “could deal with [opacity] easily”.

Eric adds, in a comment on the last post:

The point of that is to say that derived environment effects are cases of opacity that can't be easily handled by rule ordering alone.

The person I originally paraphrased had given simple opacity examples, like Canadian Raising. But we can expand the notion to include derived environment effects (DEE). And they do go beyond what's directly predicted and handled automatically by rule ordering alone. I'm not sure that changes much from part II: Classic opacity from the interaction of postlexical rules is predicted by and falls out automatically from generative phonology. By contrast, Baković (2007:220) quotes McCarthy on this:

Unless further refinements are introduced, OT cannot contend successfully with any non-surface-apparent generalizations, nor with a reside of non-surface-true-generalizations.

But are these mere 'refinements'? Simple constraint ranking as a way of getting optimal forms is one thing, while allowing conjunction among constraints (like other similar refinements) vastly changes and complicates OT's basic mechanics. Some old-school linguists who are waiting for the theory bus to turn the corner are left scratching their heads as to why OT crucially relies on gymnastic moves precisely where one shouldn't.

In traditional phonology, it's when we get to how morphology interacts with phonology, as in prototypical DEE, that we need additional tools. You need nothing fancy to handle purely phonological opacity, but you might where phonology and morphology meet.

Having read "A revised typology of opaque generalizations", I see why Eric got so bent over a quip that opacity is easy in earlier models and hard for OT: His article aims to debunk precisely this view. It's a balanced account, where everybody has trouble with some types of opacity and can handle others. Still, the problems he hangs around the neck of traditional models are quite different from those OT faces (above). Eric concedes that Vaux's non-OT analysis of New Julka Armenian is "technically true" (p. 246), but Vaux "presents no specific arguments for this ordering analysis, empirical or otherwise". Vaux's ordering produces the right output, while the reverse ordering does not. It's not that a traditional analysis won't work, but that Eric doesn't find it sufficiently motivated?

Eric was right that I was going to skirt Challenge III, and I appreciate him prodding me. As hinted at above, I wonder if he isn't onto something about how phonology-morphology interactions appear more contortion-prone than plain phonology. When students gripe about the drivel they claim to get from their phonology or morphology profs (apologies to the peerage), often it is over such resultant interactions (or what happens to newbie sounds trying to squat on derivational territory occupied by old sounds at stem's edge). But what's odd about the phon-morph relation is that students often take a different approach from paid phonologists: They're content to load the lexicon, a Third Way of the Declarative Phonology sort. Correct me on this, not being a phonologist and all, but serial models of sound systems seem not to miss cross-lexicon generalizations brought about by loading the lexicon nor to create unnecessary problems by restructuring the nature of constraint evaluation.

With those questions tossed out there and with my flame retardant suit on, I'll leave this for now, but will return to Challenge IV soon, and maybe even a postscript after that. I'm just trying to figure this stuff out.

Challenge III:

3. SPE(-and-subsequent-developments) “could deal with [opacity] easily”.
Although it is conveniently hardly ever talked about in this way, ‘derived environment effects’ are precisely cases of opacity that cannot be “dealt with easily” in SPE, by which I mean that rule ordering on its own won’t do the trick. Consider the classic Finnish assibilation case (whether or not you believe it): t → s / __i, but “only in derived environments”. Let’s stick to phonologically-derived environments here: assibilation does not apply to underlying /ti…/, because no part of the structural description of assibilation is derived; assibilation does apply to /…te/, because there is another rule raising word-final /e/ to [i], which means that this part of the structural description of assibilation is derived by raising. (So: /ti…/ → [ti…], but /…te/ → |…ti| → […si].)

Several things to note here. First, this is a case of opacity of Kiparsky’s (1973) “Type (i)”: assibilation is not surface-true, because there are surface strings of the kind that match the structural description of assibilation (to wit, [ti…]). Second, although many examples of non-surface-truth can be accounted for with counterfeeding rule ordering, this kind of case cannot, which is why some separate principle(s) responsible for derived environment effects are necessary — hence my conclusion that SPE does not, in fact, “deal with [opacity] easily” in the way Mr. Verb’s summer-upper and many others claim. Third, how does the distinction between ‘derived’ and ‘non-derived’ require any less “gymnastics” than the one between ‘new’ and ‘old’ markedness constraint violations, the basic idea behind comparative markedness? I’d really like to know.

Image from here.

OT gymnastics? The challenge, pt. deux

OK, I haven't more than skimmed the comments on the earlier opacity post, and don't have time for more than a quick stab at the second challenge right now. And keep in mind that I'm not a real phonologist, so this is just amateur hour start to finish. (I have talked to a couple of professionally-trained phonologists about this.) Still, let's blindly plunge ahead to challenge no. 2:

2. OT requires “lots of gymnastics” to account for opacity, while SPE doesn’t.

The full text of the challenge is pasted in at the bottom of this post, for quick reference. Almost all of the comments that seem to have pissed people off were all paraphrases of things others had said, but the word gymnastics was actually my choice, so I should explain it. Here's part of what Merriam-Webster's 11th says about the word:

1 … b : a competitive sport in which individuals perform … acrobatic feats mostly on special apparatus …
2 : an exercise in intellectual or artistic dexterity *my earlier philosophic study had been an intellectual gymnastic — John Dewey* *mental gymnastics*
3 : a physical feat or contortion …

I guess I had parts of all those things in mind. (By the way, Dewey was talking about being inspired by Hegel's philosophy, "no mere intellectual formula".)

In terms of fundamental architecture, theories with serial derivation can very comfortably handle cases like Canadian Raising or Tiberian Hebrew spirantization, where we have interactions among post-lexical rules. The rules are benignly learned independent of each other by the child, and ordered appropriately, perhaps without the help of opacity. The resultant opacity emerges from the particular rules and the particular ordering. The rules and ordering are boorish at best, but the interaction is sophisticated at worst. (It also mirrors how language change works, as Adam Ussishkin rightly noted.) Again, precisely this kind of pattern is common in language and easily handled, even predicted by a serial rule-based model. Additional conditions on the application of rules like structure preservation and the derived environment condition seem to represent refinements of our understanding of rule application. Maybe these refinements to rule application are gymnastics as Eric suggests but there hasn't been any improvement on the phenomena of structure preservation and derived environment effects produced by OT. So it would seem that we all need to be flexible.

In contrast, sympathy theory, comparative markedness and OT-CC really feel like gymnastics — using some special apparatus, needing dexterity and requiring contortion. To many people these feel like kludges that fail to fix a fundamental part of the basic architecture: 'classic OT' seems inherently ill-suited to garden-variety opacity. As exciting as many of us found OT in its early days, and while it provided new ways to think about some of the cases that rattled phonology through especially the '80s, early versions simply had no clean way of handling opacity — which triggered the string of contortions and acrobatics mentioned earlier. At that point, a number of people feared that we were looking at a great leap backwards: Even if the new approach could address the kinds of problems that arose with, say, late Lexical Phonology, to abandon a basic kind of approach that has served us well (since, what, Panini?), some linguists felt the new approach should have an honest way of dealing with a basic phenomenon the old approach could handle.

I'm not interested in declaring who's wrong or right; I'm just trying to understand how language works. But it seems like the people I paraphrased earlier had a point, even in light of Eric's comments: You just can't really compare some things that were "at some point or other brought to bear on opacity" with wholesale reworking of a theory to handle simple opacity.

Now that I look at challenge #3, it looks like basically the same as #2, so maybe I'll skip to #4. Stay tuned!

Challenge 2:

2. OT requires “lots of gymnastics” to account for opacity, while SPE doesn’t.
But — I hear you object to what I just wrote above — by “monostratal” Mr. Verb must mean “non-serial within a lexical-phonological stratum”, and in that sense he’s basically right. John McCarthy is without a doubt the most visible proponent of OT who accepts that at least some legitimate cases of opacity are not reducible to cross-stratal interactions, and is also the one who has developed most of the proposals to amend ‘classic’ OT to accomodate such cases of opacity, in particular those that Mr. Verb specifically mentioned (sympathy theory and comparative markedness). McCarthy’s most recent proposal, OT-CC (see his book and some of his more recent papers on ROA), is likely to be viewed by critics as just so many more gymnastics (as opposed to a proposal that makes predictions that may be right or wrong).

But is SPE really any different in this regard? What about the transformational cycle, the Elsewhere Condition, structure preservation, the alternation condition, the strict cycle condition, and so on? Each of these developments within SPE was at some point or other brought to bear on opacity, whether to help account for cases of it or to constrain the power of ordered rules to generate particularly outlandish kinds of opacity (’Duke of York’ derivations and absolute neutralization being particularly well-beaten horses). I’d like to see someone explain how any these developments within SPE are not “lots of gymnastics” while some developments within OT are. (And I’m not brushing aside the interesting work done in the 80s that attempted to reduce some of the developments within SPE to others, though I don’t believe many of these attempts were particularly successful.)

Image of Contortion Girl from here. Pretty amazing contortion, I'd say.

Parallel vs serial phonology

Phonoloblog is one of my favorite linguistics blogs and a number of us around here read it. Over there, Eric has posted a pretty sharply worded "challenge" to Mr. Verb "to defend" claims from somebody else I paraphrased this way a while back in a post:

Opacity is ubiquitous in human language, and earlier theories of phonology could deal with it easily. It’s hard to see why those advantages have been abandoned for an approach that can’t handle opacity without lots of gymnastics, if at all, for benefits that don’t look all that great.

Here are the challenges:

• OT is by definition monostratal.
• OT requires “lots of gymnastics” to account for opacity, while SPE doesn’t.
• SPE(-and-subsequent-developments) “could deal with [opacity] easily”.
• The benefits of OT over SPE “don’t look all that great”.

I don't mind having a go at these challenges, even though my paraphrase truly was representing somebody else's positions as I recalled them. But first, a story (this version from here):

Farmer Jones got out of his car and while heading for his friend's door, noticed a pig with a wooden leg. His curiosity roused, he asked, "Fred, how'd that pig get him a wooden leg?"

"Well, Michael, that's a mighty special pig! A while back a wild boar attacked me while I was walking in the woods. That pig there came a runnin', went after that boar and chased him away. Saved my life!"

"And the boar tore up his leg?"

"No he was fine after that. But a bit later we had that fire. Started in the shed up against the barn. Well, that ole pig started squealin' like he was stuck, woke us up, and 'fore we got out here, the darn thing had herded the other animals out of the barn and saved 'em all!"

"So that's when he hurt his leg, huh, Fred?"

"No, Michael. He was a might winded, though. When my tractor hit a rock and rolled down the hill into the pond I was knocked clean out. When I came to, that pig had dove into the pond and dragged me out 'fore I drownded. Sure did save my life."

"And that was when he hurt his leg?"

"Oh no, he was fine. Cleaned him up, too."

"OK, Fred. So just tell me. How did he get the wooden leg?"

"Well", the farmer tells him, "A pig like that, you don't want to eat it all at once!"

This Phonoloblog post is kinda like that pig … so good you don't want to eat it all at once. Let's take the first of those four legs for now: parallelism versus serialism. Eric writes this below his list of challenges:

I’m pretty sure that it’s safe to assume that “earlier theories of phonology” refers to serial, rule-based generative phonology in the SPE-and-subsequent-developments sense, and that “any monostratal theory (one without stages of derivation)” and “an approach that can’t handle opacity without lots of gymnastics, if at all” refers to Optimality Theory. Correct me if I’m wrong.

My formulation refers not to OT but to "monostratal approaches". (I mention OT in a broader connection earlier in the post. Elsewhere on this blog I've used the term 'mainstream OT' specifically to mean monostratal OT.) Such approaches include 'classic OT', Declarative Phonology, and others; it's of course all monostratal approaches but not all OT approaches that have trouble with opacity. So, the first challenge seems to be a misunderstanding.

Eric continues with the details of Challenge 1:

1. OT is by definition monostratal.
In both published papers and (perpetually) forthcoming books, Paul Kiparsky and Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero — and many others, certainly — have developed and argued for a marriage between the basic assumption of Lexical Phonology and Morphology (that a grammar is multistratal) and the basic assumption of Optimality Theory (that an input-output mapping is defined by applying a ranked constraint hierarchy to a set of candidate outputs derived from the input). (The possibility of such a marriage was suggested, but not followed up on, in McCarthy & Prince (1993).)

It's true enough to say that stratal OT was mentioned as possible early on (including by Prince & Smolensky 1993), but it's not simply that it wasn't followed up on: A major theme in classic OT has been that serial derivation was a really bad idea, from P&S '93 up until almost the present day.* It's not hard to find places where Optimality Theorists appear to conflate parallel evaluation and OT, though, like in this quote from P&S 1993:137 [in the ROA version]:

When all of the relevant constraints are assessed in parallel, as in Optimality Theory, an entire completed parse is subject to evaluation. … [A] number of further cases of crucial parallelism are discussed in McCarthy & Prince 1993. The crux of the matter is that the grammar must determine which total analysis is wellformed— a task impeded by the use of serial algorithms to build structure step-by-step.

That's Part I, too much thinking for one day. But there's plenty more meat on this pig!

* I've always liked the index entry in McCarthy's Thematic Guide: "serial derivation, problematic", with a string of page references.

Image from here, continuing the linguistics/music connection thing.

Opacity update

A while back, I did a kind of accidental post on opacity. Time for a quick update: I've learned from emails flying among local linguists that 'mainstream' Optimality Theorists are now adopting a bold new solution to this problem: Harmonic Serialism. It's laid out in this paper:

McCarthy, John J. Forthcoming. “The serial interaction of stress and syncope.” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Available here.

It's an explicit return to serial derivation, but of course keeping 'harmonic' aspects familiar from OT. There are numerous people out there still fighting the war for monostratal phonology and it'll be interesting to see how they react to this.

Opacity

A couple of days back, someone commented on the post about Zombie Feynman, where I mentioned that folks have compared Optimality Theory in phonology with String Theory in physics. This led me to mention opacity, bringing this question:

How pervasive is opacity really? (I'm not trying to be obnoxious, I really want to know!) I'm still a newbie (i.e. lowly grad student), but every time I hear someone talk about opacity, they mention the same Hebrew examples.

First, if your question doesn’t start with ‘yo, asshole’ or ‘as every schoolboy knows’, I figure it doesn’t count as obnoxious. (And we live by the energy of grad students precisely because they almost always really want to know answers.)

OK, starting with some background for non-linguists. Opacity is a name for patterns that are not 'surface true'. Following Kiparsky's formulation, take this kind of process:

A → B/C__D

That is, some sound 'A' becomes 'B' when it appears between 'C' and 'D'. It's opaque if you do get A in this environment or if you get B for some other reason. This was long captured by using ordered rules. (McCarthy, in his Thematic Guide, aptly says that serial derivation allows us to "state temporary truths".) Here are two examples from Greg Iverson's "Rule Ordering", Handbook of Phonological Theory:

First, Canadian Raising for one variety of Canadian English (following Joos 1952) interacts with flapping in a crucial way:

• Raising: /ay, aw/ centralize to [əy, əw] before voiceless consonants (not voiced).
• Flapping: /t/ merges with /d/ between vowels to what we can characterize as [d].

If the rules apply in that order, you get rider [raydɚ] but writer [rəydɚ]. Looking only at the surface form, writer looks like it doesn't have the environment for raising but it does. (In some kind of Canadian English, it works the other way.) The 'temporary truth' would be the moment where writer has a /t/ to trigger raising, even though we don't see the /t/ on the surface.

Second, in Icelandic, the word for 'package' is böggli, from /bagg+ul+i/. The /u/ triggers umlaut (/a/ becomes [ö]) but it is then deleted, leaving its 'trace' on the final form. Here, it looks like you don't have the environment for umlaut, but you do.

And opacity is pervasive in human language. Derivations and Constraints in Phonology, ed. by Iggy Roca explores a set of examples from Dutch, Berber, Polish, Yokuts and so on, in addition to the now-famous Hebrew spirantization examples Idsardi treats there.

That answers the reader's direct question, but consider why this matters: In any monostratal theory (one without stages of derivation), getting these interactions is a huge problem. This isn't the place to run through them, but some readers will be familiar with sympathy theory, comparative markedness, and so on. I heard one person sum it up this way a few years ago:

Opacity is ubiquitous in human language, and earlier theories of phonology could deal with it easily. It's hard to see why those advantages have been abandoned for an approach that can't handle opacity without lots of gymnastics, if at all, for benefits that don't look all that great.

Those gymnastics remind some people of String Theory, I think.

Finally, I beg forgiveness for polluting the consistently low level of discussion here with a moment of theoretical linguistic seriousness, but I promise we'll return to the gutter faster than a 16-pound ball hurled by a hyperactive, sugar-high kid at a bowling alley birthday party.

Image from here.

More on -t- ~ -ss- alternations

A few months ago, I posted about a joke involving latinate derivational morphology in English, namely -t- ~ -ss-, where a break in the show at Second City was announced this way:

Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for intermission. Please intermiss.

The speaker undid the s > ʃ, but didn't reach back all the way to a t, like we have with transmit ~ transmission, remit ~ remission, and many more. I suggested that "Please intermit" would have been an odd, bookish-sounding joke (though that verb exists in a somewhat different meaning) and that the middle road taken here was a good one. (This differs from politics, where "there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos", according to the great Texas populist Jim Hightower. See here.)

Well, a somewhat parallel case has come up on the big linguistics blogs, notably on Language Log, here. It starts with this from BoingBoing:

We feed kids gross things, but this reaches new levels of grotitude.

And in email to Mark Liberman of LL, Lynne Murphy of Separated by a Common Language raised, basically, the question of whether this was the latinate pattern. Liberman argues for a role of grody/grotty in prompting the t here. Plausible, for sure, but I don't know if I'm convinced yet. My form of the latter word is grody and I'd automatically spell the -tudiness form groditude. For those who have grotty, wouldn't you go with grottitude?

But he goes on to lay out very nicely how the -tude stuff bubbles around especially in old hacker slang. There's the hook for me: Ordinary humans may seem unlikely to work back from -ss- to -t-, but think about general computer and hacker slang plurals like these:

• sg. ~ pl.
  
• virus ~ virii
• vax ~ vaxen

This is a specialized kind of play with language, obviously, and vaxen is presumably based on ox/oxen, not Latin. Besides, the kids these days hardly seem to know what vax is/was. Still, these examples suggest to me that -tudinous talk could include the -ss- ~ -t- alternation too.

By no means am I arguing that the above is the story and that the grody/grotty story is wrong — this seems like an area of language where multiple pressures pushing in one direction yield a particular outcome.

NC place assimilation

One of the first patterns that's usually talked about in phonology is that nasals often assimilate to the place of articulation of a following stop, fricative. So, un-/in- in English is pronounced with a labial nasal [m] before p (impossible, and unbelievable, unless you really stress the prefix there) and with a velar nasal [ŋ] before k (incredible, uncool). But the process is usually limited to /n/, and we don't have problems saying things like Aamco with [mk].

I just heard people on the Stephanie Miller Show mocking Bush for yet another gaffe on the international stage (don't ask — sounds like it involved overflowing foam on his near-beer during a toast), this time in Heiligendamm, Germany. Stephanie Miller repeatedly called him Dummkopf, and it sure sounded like it was pronounced with [ŋk].

It actually works pretty well, since German has the noun Dung, meaning 'manure' (hey, the languages are related!). For yucks, I checked the term and there is actually a placename Dungkopf. Not changing my vacation travel plans to go there, though.

TETU: A new interpretation

Joe reports in from a conference (where he has less blogging access than we do here on a fishing trip) that Optimality Theory's famous "TETU", the emergence of the unmarked, has been redefined, in a speech error during a talk:

The Emergency of the Unmarked.

We've got some phonologists readers out there; I want some good examples of how the emergency of the unmarked arises and gets resolved.

Film at 11.

Update 9:51 pm: Joe reports back that the speaker in question was John Scott, a grad student from Indiana who was speaking on Gothic and Sanskrit partial reduplication at the Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference at Penn State. Joe likes the idea of carefully defining the emergency of the unmarked and getting a place for it in the literature. (He also says that trout seasons starts this weekend out there ... maybe I shoulda gone with those Germanic linguists.)