li51x@sdcc3.UUCP (li51x) (03/01/85)
Hi! I'm a graduate student in linguistics here at UCSD. The surf is flat and it's time too crack the books and I NEED a topic for a phonolgy paper. What, may you ask, is phonolgy? It's a branch of linguistics that attempts to explain and find regularities in the sound patterns of speech (EG vowel harmony in Turkish, aspiration of word initial stop consonants in English, metathesis of consonants in Hebrew verbs with the reflexive prefix /it/). The prof suggested that I investigate something related to stress (because we're studying Chomsky and Halle's work on this, et. al) and something related to Hebrew (because I know more Hebrew than he does) and something related to rhymes (because that's an area of interest for him). "Stress" is what differentiates "log onto" from "logon to" and the noun "inebriate" from the verb "inebriate"--because current theories deal with when vowels get reduced. What I'd like to do is compare the stress patterns in spoken Hebrew to stress patterns for the same words when found in children's rhymes. Yet, I have the feeling that just because this phenomenon is exhibited in English, doesn't mean that a search for it in Hebrew will be fruitful (especially given the CV (consonant-vowel) structure of Hebrew) Can anyone offer me any of the following: (a) a pointer to rhymes in Hebrew (b) " " " " " " which have stress patterns differing from those in running speech (c) encouragement or discouragement as to the existence of (b) (d) knowledge of which language(s) might exhibit this phenomenon (e) ideas for another phonolgy paper topic (f) ideas for another professor to teach me phonology :} [toda raba] "thanks" in Hebrew using the International Phonetic Alphabet and the closest [r] available on a keyboard. --Michelle