(no subject)

[sacundim]

My DSL's been funky for the past week, which means no LJ'ing for me. So, under the cut, a long-due response to mendaxveritas's comment in my last post.


Uh... hold on there. In the case of "sing", there is no verb "s" to which an -ing suffix has been applied to form a noun "sing". If that were the case, then you probably could say sin', relying on context to inform the listener that you meant "sing" and not "sin".

Good. You understand the difference between a phonological rule and a morphophonological one. Most people don't.

The written difference (actually writing it as showin') is simply an example of "writing in dialect", which is to say, there's really no such word as showin', it's just a written form of showing that attempts to indicate a particular pronunciation.

But here you're going wrong. There are several facts that need to be stated about the relation between showing and showin':

1. There is a difference in pronunciation between them, and native English speakers are aware of that difference, and assign it stylistic value.
   
   
2. that the difference between them is irrelevant for syntax, which only cares about the fact that they're realizations of paradigm cell #324;
   
   
3. that they are both ways of rendering the phonological content of paradigm cell #324 specifically; (or in other words, that the conditions are morphological; contrast the rule for a/an, which is conditioned exclusively by phonology);
   
   
4. that every verb in English has a paradigm cell #324, and that the rule relating showing and showin' is just a specific, predictable instance of a more general rule: for a verb V, the phonological content of paradigm cell #324 for V is obtained, roughly, by appending either -in or -ing to the phonological content of V's base form (which is, in fact, another paradigm cell; call it #423, whatever).

Another way of putting this whole thing, which perhaps gets to the heart of the matter more directly: showing and showin' form an equivalence class for syntax, but not for phonology. And it's describing the equivalence classes up to isomorphism that I care about, not any one particular system of rules that does it; in other words, the rules are merely a means to get at the structure of the language.

And now, to object to one specific bit of the quote above:

[...] there's really no such word as showin', it's just a written form of showing that attempts to indicate a particular pronunciation.

Here you're implicitly making a two-way distinction between "words" and "pronunciations," such that showing and showin' are "the same word," but "different pronunciations." My answer to that is that you're making at least two distinctions too few:

1. There is one sense in which show, showed, shown, showing and showin' are all "the same word." In morphology, the technical way of saying this is that they're all instance of the same lexeme. And in the same sense, showing is not "the same word" in showing the movie tomorrow as in tomorrow's showing of the movie; they're instances of different lexemes (related by a regular rule, of course).
   
   
2. There is another sense in which showing and showin' are "the same word", but neither is "the same word" as shown. The usual technical term for this is that shown and showing are different inflectional forms; but actually, for a number of reasons, I find it better to call them paradigm cells.
   
   
3. There is yet another sense, in which showing and showin' are not "the same word." A good way of expressing this is that they are different realizations of the same paradigm cell, to use my terminology).
   
   
4. Finally, there is a sense in which the American and the British RP pronunciations of butter are "the same word," and this fourth sense is different from the previous one, because it has to do with the sound structure of English, not the word structure (as the -ing/-in' rule does, given that it can't apply to sing/sin).

I mean, English speakers do not go around with all these abstract grammatical concepts in their minds, applying them with the precision of a linguist to work out the right way to say things. Instead, they try to speak as they've heard others speak.

I think here you go wrong when you say "as they've heard others speak." How can we judge that they try to speak as they've heard others do, without at least an attempt to describe how they and the others speak? You're going to have to sit down and tell us what the relation is between sound and meaning in their language and in the language they've heard from others, and compare them.

And again, I don't particularly care about one particular set of rules or its strict psychological reality, so much as (a) how the set of rules demonstrates the structure of language, and (b) how the structure of language constrains a realistic psychological theory thereof.