i u 5i 1 MAR 1 1998 99b Spr- ODV 2 lences VOLUME 25, NUMBER 1 (SPRING 1995) [Published February 1997] DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS JNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN THELieR/yWOFTHE C9 19S8 Of )Limo\s STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES PUBLICATION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS IN THE COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN General Editor: Elmer H. Antonsen EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: Mark Honegger Editorial board: Elabbas Benmamoun, Eyamba G. Bokamba, Chin-Chuan Cheng, Jennifer S. Cole, Georgia M. Green, Hans Henrich Hock, Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, Chin-W. Kim, Charles W. Kisseberth, Peter Lasersohn, Howard Maclay, Jerry L. Morgan, Rajeshwari Pandharipande, James H. Yoon, and Ladislav Zgusta. AIM: SLS is intended as a forum for the presentation of the latest original re- search by the faculty and students of the Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Scholars outside the Department and from other institutions are also cordially invited to submit original linguistic research for consideration. In all cases, articles submitted for publication will be reviewed by a panel of at least two experts in the appropriate field to determine suitability for publication. Copyright remains with the individual authors. Authors will receive one copy of the particular issue and 10 offprints of their individual contributions. SLS appears twice a year, and one issue is traditionally devoted to restricted, specialized topics. A complete list of available back issues is given inside the back cover. BOOKS FOR REVIEW: Review copies of books may be sent to: Editor, Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Department of Linguistics, 4088 For. Lang. Bldg., University of Illinois 707 S. Mathews, Urbana, IL 61801, USA SUBSCRIPTION: Requests for subscriptions should be addressed to SLS Sub- scriptions, Department of Linguistics, 4088 Foreign Languages Building, Univer- sity of Illinois, 707 South Mathews, Urbana, Illinois 61801. Price: $10.00 per single issue. e-mail address: [email protected] Telephone: (217) 333-3563 Fax: (217) 333-3466 STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES Papers in General Linguistics EDITOR Elmer H. Antonsen EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Mark Honegger VOLUME 25, NUMBER 1 (SPRING 1995) [Published February 1997] DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS URBAN A, ILLINOIS 61801 EDITOR'S NOTE Although this issue bears the volume and issue designation 25:1 Spring 1995, thereby filling a gap in the journal's twice-a-year scheduled appearance, because of unavoidable circumstances it could not be published until February 1997. We have therefore indicated the actual publication date in square brackets where appropriate. ' 7 CONTENTS Editor's Note ii ELMER H. ANTONSEN: On phonological reconstruction: "Weil die Schrift . immer strebt . 1 LAURA J. DOWNING: Correspondence effects in Siswati reduplication 1 ANNA M. KISHE: The modernization of Tanzanian KiSwahili and language change 37 ANDREW TILIMBE KULEMEKA: On the meaning of Chichewa ideophones 5 1 CAROL KUTRYB: The effect of complementizer that on extraction from embedded clauses 67 ANITA PANDEY: The pragmatics of code alteration in Nigerian English 75 YURIKO SUZUKI KOSE: Sentence-final particles in Japanese — an alterna- tive to scalar analyses 119 FRANS VAN COETSEM: Variation in the rate of language change due to societal influence: Examples from the Germanic languages 137 MARY A. WU: Meaning and form: Computing definite and uniqueness readings of complex noun phrases in Mandarin Chinese 145 REVIEWS Alaa Elgibali (ed.) (1996). Understanding Arabic: Essays in Con temporary Arabic Linguistics in Honor of El-Said Badawi. (Elabbas Benmamoun) 159 Christoph Gutknecht & Lutz J. Rolle (1996). Translating by Factors. (Ladislav Zgusta) 163 Alexander M. Schenker (1996). The Dawn of Slavic: An Introduction to Slavic Philology. (Frank Y. Gladney) 167 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Volume 25, Number 1 (Spring 1995) [publ. February 1997] ON PHONOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION: 'WEIL DIE SCHRIFT IMMER STREET ...' Elmer H. Antonsen University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [email protected] For James W. Marchand on his 70th birthday, 11 November 1996 Recent treatments of umlaut in the Germanic languages by adher- ents of the generative school deny the validity of the American struc- turalist explanation of this phenomenon, according to which original allophonic variants developed into phonemic contrasts. The generativ- ists claim to 'take the orthography [of medieval manuscripts] seriously', whereby a lack of written designation is taken to indicate the absence of phonological differentiation. I attempt to show that such studies cannot claim to deal with phonology, but are strictly orthographic analyses. 0. Introduction The early years of the 19th century were certainly exciting ones for the pioneers in the newly developing science of historical linguistics, and partic- ularly in historical Germanic linguistics.* Some of us are familiar with the rela- tionship between Jacob Grimm and Rasmus Rask in this fledgling science, al- though the profound influence that Rask had on Grimm is sometimes obscured by later investigators (see Antonsen 1962, and Robins 1990:189). One thing they both had in common, something that was simply a sign of the age in which they worked: they took the view that they were dealing with Buchstaben or Bogstaver 'letters', and they wrote about the relationship among letters and of the change of one letter to another. It was not an easy thing to overcome, and those of us who have taught beginning linguistics courses are familiar with the difficulty naive students (and sometimes even more sophisticated ones) have in distinguishing between the written symbol, on the one hand, and the phonological reality behind it, on the other. Through the combined efforts of the 19th-century phoneticians and the Neogrammarians the fundamental distinction between sound and letter was clarified to a large extent (cf. Pedersen 1962:303-310), but even so, the con- fusion between the two has remained a stumbling block in historical Germanic research right up to the present day, since scholars in our field still are not agreed on the nature of the relationship between writing and phonology. In more recent discussions of the phenomenon of umlaut in the Germanic languages, some scholars have declared their firm intention to 'take the orthog- raphy seriously' (e.g., Voyles 1976:1). Voyles (1976:2) assumes 'the orthography of these texts — as indeed of the OHG literary monuments in general — accurately reflects the phonology of the language', which is to be taken to mean that the lack 2 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 25: 1 (Spring 1995) of an explicit designation in thie writing system is to be equated with the absence of a given phonological feature. It is basically this problem that I would like to address, along with some related questions that have interested me over the years and deserve more attention than they have received in the past. 1. The discovery of the 'cause' of umlaut It is an established fact that the one fundamental discovery concerning Ger- manic umlaut was made by Rasmus Rask in his Vejledning til det Islandske eller gamle Nordiske Sprog [Guide to the Icelandic or Old Nordic Language] (1811: 44-45) when he proposed that the varying vowels in the root syllable of a para- digm like Icelandic hond 'hand' (see Table 1) were dependent on the nature of the VOWEL THAT FOLLOWED, OR THAT HAD ONCE FOLLOWED, the root syllable, so that the o of the nominative and accusative forms was dependent on a formerly present -u in the following syllable (as could be confirmed by the presence of such a vowel in Go. handus and handu), while the a of the genitive was dependent on the -a of its suffix, and the e of the dative on the following -/. Sg. nom. hond (cf Gothic handus) gen. handar dat. hendi ace. hond (cf Gothic handu) Table 1. It took considerable time for Jacob Grimm to become convinced of the cor- rectness of this analysis by Rask, but eventually he came to embrace it as his own in the second edition of the first volume of his Deutsche Grammatik [German(ic) Grammar] (1822:12.169), which he had thoroughly revised after reading Rask's works and before publishing the further volumes. This discovery by Rask was, of course, merely the beginning of a long and arduous search to unveil the secrets of that vocalic phenomenon so characteristic of Germanic. In a number of instances, this search for an understanding of umlaut was actually impeded by theories that were advanced by Jacob Grimm and subsequently accepted by the scholarly community for years to come. I do not mean to rave against Jacob Grimm, who is one of my true heroes (I am reminded of the remark attributed to Niels Bohr: T do not mean to be critical, but this is sheer nonsense'). It is necessary to put things into perspective, however, and although we must understand the limitations imposed by his times, in some respects Grimm failed to see clearly where others nevertheless did. An example of this failing can be found by comparing the work of Georg Friedrich Benecke (1813:169), Grimm's close collaborator, who saw a definite relationship between the umlauted vowels and the ending -e of Middle High German forms like those in Table 2. At first, Jacob Grimm vigorously denied that there could be any connection between the umlauted vowel and the suffix. nom. 4 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 25: 1 (Spring 1995) work for describing diachronic phonological developments in terms of the rise of predictable conditioned variations, which through some type of further develop- ment eventually produced distinctive phonological units that previously had not been present or that had displayed a different distribution from that formerly present. This theory was applied to the study of umlaut in the Germanic languages in a pioneering article before the Second World War by W.