Showing papers on "Metathesis published in 1969"

Metathesis as a Grammatical Device

Abstract: 1 A working paper on this topic was presented at the Third International Conference on Salish Languages, at the University of Victoria, August 1968, and we have profited from the discussion on that occasion. The materials on Salishan languages represented here were collected in an ongoing survey of the languages of Northwestern North America. We gratefully acknowledge here the support of the National Science Foundation through grants to the University of Washington and the University of Hawaii. We are likewise grateful to a number of individuals for private discussion of metathesis as a possible synchronic grammatical process. R. H. Robins reminded us that in a sense inversion of word order, as in English he can vs. can he?, or apparent inversion of stress elements, as in English zmp6rt vs. impbrt might be construed as cases of metathesis. Gordon Fairbanks called our attention to certain contrasts in Arabic which might be handled as involving metathesis, but as we understand the cases there is nothing to support a preference for this explanation over the usual treatment. Some other cases are treated in more detail below. M. Dale Kinkade furnished detailed reference to the Miwok phenomena, and Mary R. Haas directed our attention to Rotuman. We wish to thank Bruce Biggs especially for sharing his experience with Rotuman and Tongan, for referring us to some other reports of metathesis in the Pacific, and for kindly making available to us his copy of the rare Churchward grammar. from speech lapses. For the most part other treatments seem to agree that they are in any case sporadic (cf. for example, Paul 1920:63-5; Bloomfield 1933:391; Hockett 1958:391; Lehmann 1962:169-70). However, Grammont (1933:239-49, 339-57) cites extensive examples and makes an imaginative effort to explain these (alongside other special evolutions) in terms of his concept of increased ease of articulation within the autonomous syllabic patterns of individual languages and dialects. Although his sampling was perhaps too confined and his notion of syllabicity perhaps too limited, his efforts to get at such dynamics remain important, and worthy of more follow-up than they have had outside the circle of French-trained linguists on whom he had so much effect. (In this connection, see Sommerfelt 1962:226; note also his prefatory note on p. 7.) More recently Pitkin (ms1963) has formulated a patterning of historical metathesis in the context of continuants. For examples of the phenomenon in the New World we may mention here discussion on such diverse linguistic families as Muskogean (cf. Haas 1941:51, 53) and Penutian (cf. Hymes 1964:218; Shipley 1966:493). Salishan comparisons, too, show many cases of metathesized elements (e.g., brain: Nooksack macqin, Cowichan, Musqueam sm6oqan, Lummi sm6cqan, but Snohomish, Skagit scabqid, Thompson s6cmqin; wide: Cowichan, Musqueam lq6t, Clallam, Lummi i45t, but Snohomish, Skagit 164t, Coeur d'Alene ialt). On the synchronic scene, however, metathesis is less pervasive. We may call attention here to the exceptional cases noted by Bloomfield in Tagalog (1933:391) and

Metathesis of olefins

Abstract: THERE IS DISCLOSED A PROCESS FOR THE FORMATION OF NEW OLEFINS FROM INTERNAL OLEFINS BY SUBJECTING AN INTERNAL OLEFIN TO A CATALYST OF A MIXTURE OF ALKYLITHIUM AND TUNGSTEN OR MOLYBDENUM HALIDES.