Please post here on the Pak and Friesner reading, the Hyman reading, or anything related to the relationship between domains needed for intonation and segmental processes (Tuesday’s topic), and tone (Thursday’s).
Please post here on the Pak and Friesner reading, the Hyman reading, or anything related to the relationship between domains needed for intonation and segmental processes (Tuesday’s topic), and tone (Thursday’s).
Pak & Friesner
I was wondering about possible limitations of a reading task. The authors address issues related to speech rate and style but it is not clear to me if reading aloud and speaking aloud necessarily involve the same strategies. What is the input to the phonology in both cases?
There might be a difference between the syntactic parse assigned to a sentence during reading, as opposed to the structure built up by the narrow syntax during speech. Could this not lead to (minimally) different phonological outputs?
Do we know of any work which compares the modalities of reading and naturalistic speech in this regard, and establishes a clear equivalence or lack of it between them once style, speed and other factors have been controlled for?
The interaction of liaison with parentheticals and pauses resembles very much the effect observed by Schlenker (2010) for ma/mon allomorphy.
Normally, for feminine nouns in French, the possessive mon (resp. ton, son) is chosen for a feminine noun, if the NP begins with a vowel:
(1) a. ma femme
b. mon adorable femme
However, when the NP is interrupted, and two possessive pronouns are inserted, it is the form that is conditioned by the NP that emerges, no matter what the phonological properties of the interrupting material are:
(2) Feminine mon followed by a consonant
a. Marie a été mon / *ma, puis son épouse.
b. Marie sera soit mon /*masoit ton épouse.
(3) Feminine ma followed by a vowel
a’. Marie sera ma / *mon ou ta femme
b. Marie a été ma / *mon, et ensuite sa femme.
He provides similar examples with parentheticals
(4) a. Il est de ton/*?ta, si j’ose dire, obligation de me prêter assistance.
It is of your, if I dare say, duty to lend me assistence.
b. C’est à cette époque que j’ai réalisé mon/*?ma, disons-le, homosexualité.
It is in that period that I became aware of my, let us say it, homosexuality.
(With spelling changes, from http://meio-school.bbgraf.com/personnels-de-l-
ecole-f59/yosuke-habara-fini-t162.htm)
c. J’ai des doutes sur mon/*?ma, disons, employabilité.
He discusses several possible analyses of the phenomenon, but shows every one of them to be inadequate. I wonder whether the actual explanation for this and for the behavior of liaison should not be the same.
Schlenker, Phillippe. 2010. A phonological condition that targets discontinuous syntactic units: ma/mon suppletion in French. Snippets 22.