Vowel Length Genesis

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Yiuel Raumbesrairc
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Post by Yiuel Raumbesrairc »

MadBrain wrote:
Yiuel wrote:Oddly enough, the odd triply lengthed vowel /E::/ does not seem to show any prosodic difference, except for its length. And quite frankly, I don't know how we can actually take out any meaning from such sentences, even though I can. That can be part of the whole polysynthetic hypothesis of QcFr, where we should analyse all that as a messy phrase incorporating many things.

Indeed, the triple length marks "present-tense to preceeding word WITH dative+definiteness+initial vowel to the following word" That's worse than Spanish's "-í".
Dunno, /Zma~vE::kOl/ is maybe pushing it a bit :D (wouldn't that be /Zma~vE E:kol/?), but yeah something is up with that particular combination ("va à" and "à l'école), probably because of the high frequency of those words.
There's one thing about it. Vocalic fusion is not required; we could say that it's an optional feature of the language, like many contractions are in English. However, when I don't use fusion, "vais" is automatically pronounced /vA/, unless I push further toward normalism (and sound less natural emotionally). So the whole "va à l'école" cluster seems to fuse in a single extra-long vowel (though it could be reduced to a normal long vowel).
As for the polysynthetic French hypothesis, I think there are some arguments against that - mostly adverbs and adjectives landing in the middle of some of those clusters ("j'ai mangé"->"j'ai poliment mangé" for instance), or prepositions being matched with a too large variety of things to be affixes rather than words ("j'ai une télé pour toi", "je suis pour", "pour que tu viennes", "je suis dessus", "je suis au dessus", "Il parle de pourquoi tu veux pas", etc...)
I remember reading a bit on Inuktitut where they also incorporated many elements in their verb. They especially listed adverbial-like elements. So the inclusion of more than merely the verb and its many arguments might not be an accurate argument against analysing Quebec French as being polysynthetic.

Homonymy is relatively common around so that the presence of various meanings for a word-form that appears the same is not surprising. As others have said, cases if limited in number tend to spread in usage. Japanese is a quick example, where "-ni" marker can be used in so many ways that it's a hell for the learner to know exactly what it means.

If we look at the pronouns that can go before a verb (when describing French traditionally), you can see that you have 6 different markers. You have the four personal arguments (nominative, accusative, dative and benefactive) and you have, with them, the locative-allative "y" and genetive-ablative "en". Benefactive appears only with first and second person elements; others are not limited in appearance. (loc-all "y" and dative "lui" often merge : Je lui achète (au gars) /ZiaSEt/, J'y achète (au magazin) /ZiaSEt/)

My analysis tend to analyse a verb complex (incorporating all the particles around the verb) and then morphologically disconnected NPs. The numerous particles are not mandatory, but then again, it appears to be so in Sumerian, of all languages. The presence of both in French puts emphasis the argument :

Je parle au gars. (I'm speaking to the guy)
Je lui parle. (I'm speaking to him)
Je lui parle au gars. (I'm speaking with the guy already.)
Je mange du pain. (I'm eating some bread.)
J'en mange. (I'm eating some of it.)
J'en mange du pain. (I'm eating some bread already.)

You can also add "moi" after all that, to add yourself in the whole emphasis.

"J'en mange du pain moi."
"Je lui parle moi."

This led to my ugly example, rarely heard indeed (Je te le lui ai acheté pour toi le cadeau à son frère moi.) where I included four arguments, with both the particle and argument included. But that's kitchen-sinky, and you'll only hear partial uses (with one or two arguments, or only two or three particles).

So the whole thing is that I see that the various particles are all fused into the whole verb, leading to easy reduction. (Like Je te le lui ai acheté becoming /St9llHieaSte/, both Je and le loosing their vowel) That there may be phrases outside the verb is unsurprising (unless you want really lengthy sentences, you'll break down things), and that there may be more than arguments incorporated into the verb is hardly surprising as well, as world languages can tell us (negative conjugation? evidentiality?...).
"Ez amnar o amnar e cauč."
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Post by TaylorS »

I love your stuff on Quebec French, Yiuel! They have been a major influence in my Future Evolution of English project. :D

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Yiuel Raumbesrairc
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Post by Yiuel Raumbesrairc »

TaylorS wrote:I love your stuff on Quebec French, Yiuel! They have been a major influence in my Future Evolution of English project. :D
Hehe, thanks. However, I don't know if English is going the same way.
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Post by MadBrain »

Yeah, thinking about it, you're probably right for the verb/declined pronouns, since you can't stuff anything else between the pronouns and the following verb.


- Declined pronouns can be analyzed as affixes. So yeah in that respect, French can be reliably analyzed as synthetic. On the other hand, you can say stuff like "Je tourne les pages et lis les mots" (I turn the pages and read the words).

- Multiple chained verbs with auxilliaries and verbs like "vouloir", "devoir" (want to, have to) are probably separate words though, since you can stuff adverbs in the middle of the group, and adverbs with real lexical meaning even. Ex: "J'ai jalousement gardé ce secret" (I've jealously guarded this secret), "Le suspect a, d'une façon répétée, violé la tranquilité des lieux" (The suspect has, in a repeated manner, violated the peacefulness of the location), "J'ai lu le livre que vous m'avez donné et ensuite lavé ma cuisine" (I've read the book you gave me and then washed my kitchen).

- Verb-adjective and verb-attribute constructions in general suffer from some even worse problems: "Il est beau." (He is pretty) should be analyzed as subject - verb - attribute, since it works the same way as "J'ai rendu Bob beau" (I made Bob pretty), which is subject - verb - object - attribute. So "être beau" (be pretty) has to be 2 words.

- French prepositions are, as far as I can tell, full words: like in English, you can strand them, you can chain them: "J'ai acheté ce meuble pour dans ta chambre" (I bought this furniture for in your room), "Il y a de la poussière de devant la table jusqu'à sous la télé" (There's dust from in front of the table to under the TV), you can use adverbs on them: "Il a fait ça presque de janvier à février" (He did that almost from january to february). Plus they have all the problems determiners have (see below).

- French determiners are also, afaik, full words, but that's more debatable. They can be separated from the noun by many adjectives, although that category of adjectives is closed, and some adjectives change meaning depending on their position. Furthermore, if the adjective has an argument, it does have to appear after the noun, such as in: C'est un meilleur chocolat que le tien (It's a better chocolate than yours). Then again, you can have many adjectives between the determiner and the noun, and they can have conjunctions: La grande, très rapide, subtile et magnifique tondeuse (The large, vere fast, subtile and magnificient lawnmower). You could try to analyze the system of adjectives that can go between the determiner and the noun, but I think the simplest explanation is that they're just two separate words.

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Post by TaylorS »

Yiuel wrote:
TaylorS wrote:I love your stuff on Quebec French, Yiuel! They have been a major influence in my Future Evolution of English project. :D
Hehe, thanks. However, I don't know if English is going the same way.
The details are much different, of course, but it just served as a good example of developing agglutination right in front of us.

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Post by finlay »

look up the scottish vowel length rule.

It's not normally analysed in this way, because the contrast is regularly predictable and limited in scope, but the archetypical minimal pair is brood~brewed, which could be analysed as /brud/ vs. /bru:d/.

The reason is that while vowels in other varieties lengthen before any voiced consonant (or obstruent, I forget which), in scottish varieties it's only before voiced fricatives, /r/, and at the end of words – a closer look (eg, this example) shows that it's not really the end of words, but before morpheme boundaries. So the pair is usually phonemicised as /brud/ vs. /bru#d/ instead, simply because it's the only place a length contrast can show up.

But that's a perfectly legitimate way to introduce one into a language, anyway. Give it more scope, of course, and maybe fudge the morpheme boundaries or something so that they aren't causing the lengthening any more and then you'll have a genuine 'phoneme'.

(I don't know if other dialects have this distinction, FWIW, but from what I've heard it only seems to apply to Scottish varieties – I also remember a sociolinguistics tutor telling us about it, and having to get me to show the class because she couldn't do it herself; a minute later she got them the wrong way round...)

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