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an: A reply
Lingua 33,129-135.
0 North-Holland Publishing Company 1974
DISCUSSION THE BASE FORM OF ENGLISH A/AN: A REPLY
James R. HURFORD English Department, University ol Lancaster, Grt. Britain
In a recent issue of this journal Theo Venncmann took issue with an analysis of mine concerning the underlying phonological form of the English indefinite article (Vennemann 1972: 2 1S-216). The analysis referred to is to be found in Hurford 197 1, 1972. (Vennernann refers to tha latter nntn 111b ICL Lb,1 11V1b as a ‘persona! “VJI rnqmllnirst io& since he had at hand a &‘&WI.I”_.l copy sent to him before publication.) The matter at issue is whether the underlying form of the English indefinite article is a (implying subsequent insertion of [n] before vowels), or an [implying subsequent deletion of /n/ before consonants and glides). In my 1972 note I argued for an as the underlying form. I will not repeat my arguments fully here, as they are easily accessible, but it must be said that in his criticism of these arguments Vennemann appears to have passed over the most crucial point. I drew attention to the fact, first described in detail by Perl-mutter ( 1970), that there are signifi :ant parallels in distribution betkeen the indefinite article and the numeral one. This led Perlmutter to postulate that in syntactic structure the indefinite article and the numeral one are the same lexical item. I al:ree with Perlmutter’s analysis. Vennemann seems (at one point) to be iieve that Perlmutter’s claim, and mine, is based on the synonymy of the indefinite article and the numeral one. This is a misunderstandin&. I emphasize that Perlmutter’s arguments are not semantic but essentially syntactic, drawing on the parallels of distribution between the indefinite article and the numeral one and not on their synonymy. A careful reading of Vennemann’s criticism shows that his argument jumps illogically from a more or less correct description of Perlmutter’s hypothesis to a reasoned (and correct) attack on a different hypothesis. Thus in introducing the issue, Vennemann writes of ‘Perlmutter’s contention, based on a number of syntactic properties of the indefinite article and the numeral one’ (2 14n-2 1Sn) and a little later of ‘this
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J.R. Hurford, The base form of English a/an: a reply
syntactic argtinrent’ (21%). Then in the passage in which he attacks Perlmutter’s hypothesis, Vennemann makes no reference at all to syntax, but inexplicably begins to talk about semantics. Thus we find, The confusion in Perlmutter 1970 and in Hurford’s communication arises from an equivocation. ‘The term ‘related’ is used at both systematic: levels of representation in a grammar, the ,*mantic and the phonetic levels. Semantic entit ,s or structures may be related, and so may phonological (lexical) entities and structures. BW relatedness at one level does not allow one to infer selatedness at the other level. (215n)
This is obviously true, but irrelevant. A set of arguments similar to Perlmutter’s could not, for example, be constructed for deriving the dual endings in Sanskrit from the numeral dvau, because, despite their semantic relatedness, these forms can in no way be claimed to exhibit parallels of distribution. Neither Perlmutter nor I based the claim that the indefinite article and the numeral one must have the same phonological form on their common semantic properties, and in attributing this reasoning to us, Vennemann constructs a straw man. Attacking this straw man leaves the real argument intact, of course. Vennemann’s own criteria for phonological relatedness are stated as follows: Phonological relatedness may or may not exist, depending on (1) whe3er the indefmite artick does or does not derive etymologically from the rlumeral f.ar ‘one’, and (2) given etymological relatedness, whether phonologicz! change has or has not separate.d the realizations of these forms phonetically to a degree that makes them unrelatable by the independently justifiable phonological rules of the language. (215n)
Yennemann makes no mention here of the highly pertinent fact, pointed out in my note, that there is indeed an independently justifiable phonological rule relating the phonetic forms [wAnI and [an], as shown by alterations such as Iong c)Mevs Zong’un, big ot2e vs big’tln, etc. I assume that this point remains unopposed and Vennemann’s own criteria for phonological relatedness are therefc bre satisfied. We see, then, that the arguments in favour of an as the underlying form of the indefinite article are not invalidated by any criticism in Vennemann’s article. Let us now look at Vennemann’s own arguments in favour of the opposite view, namely that the underlying form is a. Vennemann proposes four pieces of evidence, which I discuss below.
J.R. Hut-ford, The base form of English a/an: a reply
131
Venneman writes, First, children learning English use the form a for several years before they start using the alternant an. I interpret this as the acquisition of a basic form, followed by the later acquisition of a rule expanding a to an before a word beginning with a vowel. (213)
Vennemann’s interpretation of this fact about children’s acquisition of English appears to make the assumption that underlying forms are acquired early and are usually not subsequently changed. This assumption is, as far as I know, supported by very scanty evidence (e.g. in Kazazis 1969), and is, furthermore, contradicted in a number of clear cases. Chomsky and Halle ( 1968) write, It is no doubt the case that the linguistic forms that justify our postulation of the Vowel Shift Rule in contemporary English are, in general, available to the child oniy at a faily late stage in his language acquisition, since in large measure these belong to the more learned stratum of the vocabulary.(332)
In the phonology of adult English, given Chomsky and Halle’s assumptions, the underlying representations of dime, see, game, boat are /dim/, /SC/, gZm/, b3/ respectively. These underlying forms are assigned correct phonetic representations by a set of rules motivated by consideration of forms not known to young children, although most young children undoubtedly know the four simple words cited above, olr others like them, and pronouncle them more or less the same as an adult. For a young child there is no justification for setting up the rather abstract underlying representations given above; underlying forms much closer to the phonetic representations are adequate. At the stage where it becomes necessary to post late the Vowel Shift Rule, it also becomes necessary to change the underlying representations of a large number of words. Given the assumptions about a phonological theory made by Chomsky and Halle, many other similar examples can be found. It should be said that Vennemann does not accept some of the basic assumptions of Chomsky and Halle, and in particular does not postulate underlying forms as abstract as those of Chomsky and Halle. Evidence acceptable to him that children acquiring a language may sometimes revise their initial hypotheses about underlying forms is therefore correspondingly more difficult to find, particularly given the rather anecdotal nature of child language studies. But such evidence exists and I cite some of it below.
134
J.R. Hurford, The base form of English a/an: a reply
speare’s nun& from mine uncle. The Oxford English Dictionary mentions the form nown (= OMJ~Z) in my nown, his nown, etc. from ME. min own. A whole nother is in any event very irregular and idiosyncratic. Note that nother has not been generalized to all positions as has apron from nayron. Nobody says, for example, * the nother side. Although it seems very likely that another must be related by a grammar to the indefinite article followed by other, there are certain problems with this analysis. For example, another three boys is grammatical, but expressions like *a *a different boys, *a three boys, and *a same three boys are boys, definitely ungrammatical, and ?a different three boys is marginal.
Vennemann’s fourth argument is that assuming the basic form of the indefinite article to be an is incompatible with certain hypotheses (his own, Stampe’s, and Kiparsky’s) about the way phonological rules are reordered (or ‘unordered’) diachronically. These hypotheses, from the point of view of the particular example under discussion here, are equiv’alent in that they all claim that grammars change in such a way as to bring about maximum utilization of the rules. This is just the hypothisis to which I claim my 1971 example involving the indefinite article to be counterevidence. It is not valid, therefore, to cite this hypothesis as evidence against the particular analysis of the indefinite article that I have proposed. To adopt any such procedure would be to exempt Kiparsky’s ‘maximum utilization of rules’ hypothesis from the possibility of empirical verification. Kiparsky himself has written that the example involving the indefinite article illustrates ‘a flaw’ in his hypothesis (Kiparsky 197 1: 6 18). Vennemann dismisses an objection to postulating a phonological rule inserting [n] : There does not seem to exist any pwticular reason to insert an n rather than any other English consonants which can occur intwvocalically. The only answer is that this is typical of ali hiatus rules. Hiatus rules are motivated only to the extent that they create the preferred syllable structure (C)VCV bv introducing some consonant(s) in certain (C)W combinations; but the particular identity of the introduced consonant(s) is synchronically unmotivatable. The particular consonant(s) inf.roduced by a hiatus rule can only be explained historically. (216)
Vennemann believes, then, that the range of hiatus breaking consonants found in natural languages is totally unsystematic and defies explanation (except in diachronic terms). We expect linguists who arrive at such pessimistic conclusions to cite large amounts of apparently intran-
J.R. Hurford, The base form of English a/an: a reply
135
sigent data, but Vennemann mentions only one other case of a hiatus breaking consonant, the [r] inserted by some speakers in the middle of idea is. Let us not give up so easily. A priori we must work on the assumption that sww explanation for the range of epenthetic hiatus breaking consonants is possible, and, as a matter of fact, this assumption does not seem implausible, particularly when we eliminate spurious examples or epenthetic hiatus breakers, such as I claim the n of the English indefinite article to be. It is clear that a rule deleting a consonant, which need not be specified fully in features by the rule, is a more economic and more natural rule than a rule specifically inserting an [n] , which must, of course, be fully ‘spelled out’ in features by the rule. In short, the arguments advanced in favour of the basicness of a rather than 1z.4disintegrate upon close inspection. (I must mention in conclusion that, though we are at odds on this matter of the indefinite article, I found Vennemann’s paper to be generally useful and stimulating.)
References Chomsky, N. and M. H.ll.le, 1968. The .;ound pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row. Fry, D.B., 1966. The development of the phonological system in the normal and the deaf child. In: F. Smith & G.A. Miller (eds.), The genesis of language. Cambridge, Mw.: M.I.T. Press, 187 -206. Hurford, J.R., 19’71. Review of E. Bach & R.T. Harms (eds.), Universals in linguistic theory. JL 7,132-145. Hurford, J.R., 1972. The diachronic reordering of phonological rules. JL 8,293--295. Kazazis, K., 1969. Possible evidence for (near-) underlying forms in the speech of a child. Papers from the fifth regional meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society, 382-388. Chicago: University of Chicago, Department of Linguistics. Kiparsky, P., 1971. Historical linguistics. In: W.O. Dingwall (ed.), A survey of linguistic science. College Park, Md .: University of Maryland. Moskowitz, AI., 1970. The two-year-old stage in the acquisition of English phonology. Lg. 46, 426-441. Perlmutter, D.M., 1970. On the article in English. In: M. Bierwisch & K. Heidolph (eds.), Progress in linguistics. The Hague: Mouton, 233-248. Skeat, W.W., 1963. A concise etymological dictionary of the English language. New York: Capricorn Books. Slobin, D.I., 1966. The accjuisition of Russian as a native language. In: Smith & Miller, 129--148. Vennemann, T., 1972. Rule inversion. Lingua 29,209-242.
0 North-Holland Publishing Company 1974
DISCUSSION THE BASE FORM OF ENGLISH A/AN: A REPLY
James R. HURFORD English Department, University ol Lancaster, Grt. Britain
In a recent issue of this journal Theo Venncmann took issue with an analysis of mine concerning the underlying phonological form of the English indefinite article (Vennemann 1972: 2 1S-216). The analysis referred to is to be found in Hurford 197 1, 1972. (Vennernann refers to tha latter nntn 111b ICL Lb,1 11V1b as a ‘persona! “VJI rnqmllnirst io& since he had at hand a &‘&WI.I”_.l copy sent to him before publication.) The matter at issue is whether the underlying form of the English indefinite article is a (implying subsequent insertion of [n] before vowels), or an [implying subsequent deletion of /n/ before consonants and glides). In my 1972 note I argued for an as the underlying form. I will not repeat my arguments fully here, as they are easily accessible, but it must be said that in his criticism of these arguments Vennemann appears to have passed over the most crucial point. I drew attention to the fact, first described in detail by Perl-mutter ( 1970), that there are signifi :ant parallels in distribution betkeen the indefinite article and the numeral one. This led Perlmutter to postulate that in syntactic structure the indefinite article and the numeral one are the same lexical item. I al:ree with Perlmutter’s analysis. Vennemann seems (at one point) to be iieve that Perlmutter’s claim, and mine, is based on the synonymy of the indefinite article and the numeral one. This is a misunderstandin&. I emphasize that Perlmutter’s arguments are not semantic but essentially syntactic, drawing on the parallels of distribution between the indefinite article and the numeral one and not on their synonymy. A careful reading of Vennemann’s criticism shows that his argument jumps illogically from a more or less correct description of Perlmutter’s hypothesis to a reasoned (and correct) attack on a different hypothesis. Thus in introducing the issue, Vennemann writes of ‘Perlmutter’s contention, based on a number of syntactic properties of the indefinite article and the numeral one’ (2 14n-2 1Sn) and a little later of ‘this
130
J.R. Hurford, The base form of English a/an: a reply
syntactic argtinrent’ (21%). Then in the passage in which he attacks Perlmutter’s hypothesis, Vennemann makes no reference at all to syntax, but inexplicably begins to talk about semantics. Thus we find, The confusion in Perlmutter 1970 and in Hurford’s communication arises from an equivocation. ‘The term ‘related’ is used at both systematic: levels of representation in a grammar, the ,*mantic and the phonetic levels. Semantic entit ,s or structures may be related, and so may phonological (lexical) entities and structures. BW relatedness at one level does not allow one to infer selatedness at the other level. (215n)
This is obviously true, but irrelevant. A set of arguments similar to Perlmutter’s could not, for example, be constructed for deriving the dual endings in Sanskrit from the numeral dvau, because, despite their semantic relatedness, these forms can in no way be claimed to exhibit parallels of distribution. Neither Perlmutter nor I based the claim that the indefinite article and the numeral one must have the same phonological form on their common semantic properties, and in attributing this reasoning to us, Vennemann constructs a straw man. Attacking this straw man leaves the real argument intact, of course. Vennemann’s own criteria for phonological relatedness are stated as follows: Phonological relatedness may or may not exist, depending on (1) whe3er the indefmite artick does or does not derive etymologically from the rlumeral f.ar ‘one’, and (2) given etymological relatedness, whether phonologicz! change has or has not separate.d the realizations of these forms phonetically to a degree that makes them unrelatable by the independently justifiable phonological rules of the language. (215n)
Yennemann makes no mention here of the highly pertinent fact, pointed out in my note, that there is indeed an independently justifiable phonological rule relating the phonetic forms [wAnI and [an], as shown by alterations such as Iong c)Mevs Zong’un, big ot2e vs big’tln, etc. I assume that this point remains unopposed and Vennemann’s own criteria for phonological relatedness are therefc bre satisfied. We see, then, that the arguments in favour of an as the underlying form of the indefinite article are not invalidated by any criticism in Vennemann’s article. Let us now look at Vennemann’s own arguments in favour of the opposite view, namely that the underlying form is a. Vennemann proposes four pieces of evidence, which I discuss below.
J.R. Hut-ford, The base form of English a/an: a reply
131
Venneman writes, First, children learning English use the form a for several years before they start using the alternant an. I interpret this as the acquisition of a basic form, followed by the later acquisition of a rule expanding a to an before a word beginning with a vowel. (213)
Vennemann’s interpretation of this fact about children’s acquisition of English appears to make the assumption that underlying forms are acquired early and are usually not subsequently changed. This assumption is, as far as I know, supported by very scanty evidence (e.g. in Kazazis 1969), and is, furthermore, contradicted in a number of clear cases. Chomsky and Halle ( 1968) write, It is no doubt the case that the linguistic forms that justify our postulation of the Vowel Shift Rule in contemporary English are, in general, available to the child oniy at a faily late stage in his language acquisition, since in large measure these belong to the more learned stratum of the vocabulary.(332)
In the phonology of adult English, given Chomsky and Halle’s assumptions, the underlying representations of dime, see, game, boat are /dim/, /SC/, gZm/, b3/ respectively. These underlying forms are assigned correct phonetic representations by a set of rules motivated by consideration of forms not known to young children, although most young children undoubtedly know the four simple words cited above, olr others like them, and pronouncle them more or less the same as an adult. For a young child there is no justification for setting up the rather abstract underlying representations given above; underlying forms much closer to the phonetic representations are adequate. At the stage where it becomes necessary to post late the Vowel Shift Rule, it also becomes necessary to change the underlying representations of a large number of words. Given the assumptions about a phonological theory made by Chomsky and Halle, many other similar examples can be found. It should be said that Vennemann does not accept some of the basic assumptions of Chomsky and Halle, and in particular does not postulate underlying forms as abstract as those of Chomsky and Halle. Evidence acceptable to him that children acquiring a language may sometimes revise their initial hypotheses about underlying forms is therefore correspondingly more difficult to find, particularly given the rather anecdotal nature of child language studies. But such evidence exists and I cite some of it below.
134
J.R. Hurford, The base form of English a/an: a reply
speare’s nun& from mine uncle. The Oxford English Dictionary mentions the form nown (= OMJ~Z) in my nown, his nown, etc. from ME. min own. A whole nother is in any event very irregular and idiosyncratic. Note that nother has not been generalized to all positions as has apron from nayron. Nobody says, for example, * the nother side. Although it seems very likely that another must be related by a grammar to the indefinite article followed by other, there are certain problems with this analysis. For example, another three boys is grammatical, but expressions like *a *a different boys, *a three boys, and *a same three boys are boys, definitely ungrammatical, and ?a different three boys is marginal.
Vennemann’s fourth argument is that assuming the basic form of the indefinite article to be an is incompatible with certain hypotheses (his own, Stampe’s, and Kiparsky’s) about the way phonological rules are reordered (or ‘unordered’) diachronically. These hypotheses, from the point of view of the particular example under discussion here, are equiv’alent in that they all claim that grammars change in such a way as to bring about maximum utilization of the rules. This is just the hypothisis to which I claim my 1971 example involving the indefinite article to be counterevidence. It is not valid, therefore, to cite this hypothesis as evidence against the particular analysis of the indefinite article that I have proposed. To adopt any such procedure would be to exempt Kiparsky’s ‘maximum utilization of rules’ hypothesis from the possibility of empirical verification. Kiparsky himself has written that the example involving the indefinite article illustrates ‘a flaw’ in his hypothesis (Kiparsky 197 1: 6 18). Vennemann dismisses an objection to postulating a phonological rule inserting [n] : There does not seem to exist any pwticular reason to insert an n rather than any other English consonants which can occur intwvocalically. The only answer is that this is typical of ali hiatus rules. Hiatus rules are motivated only to the extent that they create the preferred syllable structure (C)VCV bv introducing some consonant(s) in certain (C)W combinations; but the particular identity of the introduced consonant(s) is synchronically unmotivatable. The particular consonant(s) inf.roduced by a hiatus rule can only be explained historically. (216)
Vennemann believes, then, that the range of hiatus breaking consonants found in natural languages is totally unsystematic and defies explanation (except in diachronic terms). We expect linguists who arrive at such pessimistic conclusions to cite large amounts of apparently intran-
J.R. Hurford, The base form of English a/an: a reply
135
sigent data, but Vennemann mentions only one other case of a hiatus breaking consonant, the [r] inserted by some speakers in the middle of idea is. Let us not give up so easily. A priori we must work on the assumption that sww explanation for the range of epenthetic hiatus breaking consonants is possible, and, as a matter of fact, this assumption does not seem implausible, particularly when we eliminate spurious examples or epenthetic hiatus breakers, such as I claim the n of the English indefinite article to be. It is clear that a rule deleting a consonant, which need not be specified fully in features by the rule, is a more economic and more natural rule than a rule specifically inserting an [n] , which must, of course, be fully ‘spelled out’ in features by the rule. In short, the arguments advanced in favour of the basicness of a rather than 1z.4disintegrate upon close inspection. (I must mention in conclusion that, though we are at odds on this matter of the indefinite article, I found Vennemann’s paper to be generally useful and stimulating.)
References Chomsky, N. and M. H.ll.le, 1968. The .;ound pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row. Fry, D.B., 1966. The development of the phonological system in the normal and the deaf child. In: F. Smith & G.A. Miller (eds.), The genesis of language. Cambridge, Mw.: M.I.T. Press, 187 -206. Hurford, J.R., 19’71. Review of E. Bach & R.T. Harms (eds.), Universals in linguistic theory. JL 7,132-145. Hurford, J.R., 1972. The diachronic reordering of phonological rules. JL 8,293--295. Kazazis, K., 1969. Possible evidence for (near-) underlying forms in the speech of a child. Papers from the fifth regional meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society, 382-388. Chicago: University of Chicago, Department of Linguistics. Kiparsky, P., 1971. Historical linguistics. In: W.O. Dingwall (ed.), A survey of linguistic science. College Park, Md .: University of Maryland. Moskowitz, AI., 1970. The two-year-old stage in the acquisition of English phonology. Lg. 46, 426-441. Perlmutter, D.M., 1970. On the article in English. In: M. Bierwisch & K. Heidolph (eds.), Progress in linguistics. The Hague: Mouton, 233-248. Skeat, W.W., 1963. A concise etymological dictionary of the English language. New York: Capricorn Books. Slobin, D.I., 1966. The accjuisition of Russian as a native language. In: Smith & Miller, 129--148. Vennemann, T., 1972. Rule inversion. Lingua 29,209-242.