Sarah Hawkins (sh110@cam.ac.uk)
Tue, 24 Aug 1999 17:34:58 +0100 (BST)
ps. re your question about "variability" versus "detail": I use
"systematic variability" rather than variability or detail. I think the
crucial thing is the systematicity. Things that aren;t systematic may add
naturalness, but are unlikely to be linguistically informative. I don;t
think detail is a very useful word, because whether you think something is
detailed or not depends on what you focus on. E.g., in mistime/mistake, I
would guess that most people would consider the VOT difference to be
important (i.e. NOT a detail) but the other durational differences to be
unimportant/noncrucial, and therefore they WOULD be classed as detail. But
that is because we know VOT matters in English, and the morphophon
diffferences are generally not understood to have systematic efects.
Comments?
Sarah
_____________________________________________________________________
Dr. Sarah Hawkins Email: sh110@cam.ac.uk
Dept. of Linguistics Phone: +44 1223 33 50 52
University of Cambridge Fax: +44 1223 33 50 53
Sidgwick Avenue or +44 1223 33 50 62
Cambridge CB3 9DA
United Kingdom
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