Herb,
A great explanation! However, it seems to me (maybe just my dialect) that making it a nonce alternation can be misleading, especially if you mean thereby that it is non-systematic. If you mean that we use this pronunciation when we cite the word as such, ok. I think rather that we have for "the" the specific morphophonemic rule /i/ -> @ / _C that would then correspond with the rule for /i/ in unstressed position. The word in the phrase "the more the merrier" is syntactically an adverb and still unstressed, so the instrumental seems to be a natural explanation.
My original question concerned the status of articles as clitics in the classic sense. I suppose that it is their non-stressed pronunciation in normal use (non-nonce?) that is the pivotal criterion. This seems to open up a lot of possibilities for other words having "clitic" uses in English. Wouldn't we be inclined to make prepositions when attached to noun phrases into clitics? These, of course, have distinctive uses as verbal particles and adverbs, where they would not be clitics.
Bruce
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From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2008 7:22 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Speaking of Elementary Concepts
Bruce,
The i/@ alternation with "the" is a peculiar one. It's also a nonce alternation, I think, so we don't have a general @ --> i / __V. Once explanation I've read is that this is a reflex of the old instrumental case form "thy," which also survives in the formulaic construction "the more the merrier." It's a plausible claim, but there's just no strong evidence to support it. English allows only three vowels in final unstressed position, /@/ as in "sofa," /i/ as in "party," and /o/ as in "photo." So /i/ can act as an unstressed vowel like /@/, which it clearly does in "the apple." I've found a lot of my students, though, saying "th@ apple." without an intervening glottal stop, so I suspect the @/i alternation in the article is going the way of the a/an alternation. a/an does provide analogical support for the instrumental case reflex, since the older indefinite form is "an", not "a," and, as we all know, "napkin" and "adder" arise from the confusion over whether the /n/ belongs to the article or the noun. Rather like what happens with intrusive /r/ in some r-less dialects. I tend to lean towards the instrumental reflex explanation if only because it's the only one with any historical support. Coincidentally, the /i/ of the instrumental would not have undergone the Great Vowel Shift precisely because it's unstressed.
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
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From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: July 20, 2008 5:53 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Speaking of Elementary Concepts
Herb,
I wonder about the situation you did not mention where "the" is pronounced "thee" before words beginning with a vowel (similar to the environment of "an"). Thus we have "the apple" and "the orange" etc. without the so-called reduced vowel (schwa) [unless you mean to make this a different reduced vowel]. Whatever happened to the phoneme? Can't we use morphonemics to describe these without getting driven by phonetics to make them parts of other words (mostly nouns and adjectives). Maybe we'd better [gwi:t] as in [letsgwi:t] (one word?).
Bruce
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From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, July 19, 2008 8:38 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Speaking of Elementary Concepts
All good questions. In morphology we generally distinguish between a lexeme and the various forms that it can take. Stems and their inflected forms generally comprise the variants of a lexeme, so "walked," "walks," "walking" are all variants of the lexeme WALK. "Went" is a special case of this lexemic variation called "suppletion," the substitution of an inflected form of one lexeme for a form of another lexeme. In this case, "went" is the past tense of "wend," a motion verb that we've pretty much lost in PDE except in formulaic uses. Vowel changes from Old English to Middle English rendered the present and past of "go" identical and so, probably for clarity, speakers started using "went" for the past of "go" instead, and it's been with us ever since. Inflectional morphology doesn't have to be regular, so "gone" is also a variant of GO. The two uses of "book" you give would be two different lexemes since their relationship is derivational, by functional shift, not inflectional. Derivational morphology produces new words; inflectional morphology does not.
Herb
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Adams
Sent: 2008-07-19 19:59
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Speaking of Elementary Concepts
Herb's definition of a phonological word is very interesting. I hadn't thought of that. But I think what I'm wondering about will be more clear if I give a couple of examples.
Is walked a different word from walk or just a different form of walk?
Is went a different word from go or just a different form of go?
Is book in "I read a book" a different word from book in "we always book our flights on Travelocity"?
Peter Adams
On Jul 19, 2008, at 8:45 AM, STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
With my classes I used to start with Leonard Bloomfield's definition, "A word is a minimal free form." A word is the smallest thing that you can say by itself without changing its phonological shape. So you can pronounce "house" and "houses" but you can't pronounce the plural suffix by itself, at least not without changing how it sounds or having some phonetic training. In classes where we could explore this definition more deeply, we'd look at the difference between a lexical word and a phonological word. Lexically, we call "the" a word, but as used in the sentence "The batter hit the ball," you have to either say "the" stressed and with the vowel of "mud" or, with phonetic training, you pronounce it as the unstressed syllable it is, complete with reduced vowel, something most speakers can't do. So this would mean that the phonological words would be "the batter" and "the ball." This would get us into the question of what sort of unit "the" is, which would introduce the notion "clitic" a category of form with the property of affixes that it must be attached to something, namely a phrasal category, and the property of a word that it can't be attached to a word root."
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
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From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Adams [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: July 19, 2008 12:23 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Speaking of Elementary Concepts
Can anyone help me out with a good definition or even simply a good way of explaining what a word is?
Peter Adams
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