Proceedings of the Thurneysen Fanclub: issue 15 Records of the discussions in the conference room on 13-04-2017 In attendance: David Stifter (chair), Éimear Duffy, Nicole Volmering, Anne Harrington, Siobhán Barrett, Bernhard Bauer, Elliott Lash, Lars Nooij (scribe) Apologies: Chantal Kobel, Theodorus Fransen, Fangzhe Qiu, Deborah Hayden Routine apologies assumed: Romanas Bulatovas, Elizabeth Boyle, Gearóid Ua Conchubhair Practicalities There are Easter eggs! Matters arising Last week’s detailed discussions gave rise to loads of responses. The published proceedings have under- gone a lot of editing and contain additional material to the actual discussions during last week’s meeting. First, some additions were made by Lars, having spoken with Elliott. Then David added some material. Elliott commented further upon the draft that was then sent round to the members of the fanclub, which resulted in further edits to the document before it was finalized and published online. We now note that Fangzhe and Elliott have commented extensively on said document on academia.edu overnight. All this resulted in a meeting which was largely taken up by discussing the discussion about last week’s discussions. These proceedings contain but the highlights of what was added to this during the present meeting. Elliott’s emailed comments on the previous proceedings Elliott’s comments – sent to David and Lars by e-mail – are read out during the meeting. A long time is spent discussing a sidenote on the grammatical function of stress in English relative to Old Irish, about which there is some contention between Elliott and David. Elliott argues (persuasively) that the function of stress in the two languages is not fundamentally dissimilar, but that it operates in different places and contexts. 1 Another matter which gets discussed at some length has to do with the distinction between stressed cía and pretonic ci, ce. Elliott draws a syntactic tree to visually map the distinction in function between the two. Cía occurs as a specifier to the CP (Clausal Phrase), i.e. in a position where one expects to find full phrases (e.g. Noun Phrases, Prepositional Phrases, or Clausal Phrases). Ci, ce occurs as the C (Clausal Head), i.e. in a position where one expects to find conjunct particles. The question is raised whether this in and of itself explains why cía is more common? The present mapping itself does not explain this fact, but Elliott suggests approaching the matter through the distinction between ‘discourse linked’ and ‘non-discourse linked’. The latter means that the information is completely new, whereas in the former case there is some relation to what came before. The suggestion made last week that it might have something to do with ‘topicalization’ is dismissed by Elliott, as topicalization has to do with old information, while WH-interrogatives (such as cía, ce/ci) are always linked to new information. The comments added on academia.edu Regarding the suggestion that there may be a relationship between varying stress patterns and the ortho- graphical practice of separating words from one another, Fangzhe commented that Japanese (which, like Ancient Greek, has a melodic stress) also lacks word separation. He does note that this may be due to Chinese calligraphic influence. David comments that in Classical Chinese a grapheme more or less is equal to a syllable, which in turn is equal to a word. As there was no morphology either, there was 1 As an example, he comments that in his English there is a difference of pronunciation between the noun ‘combat’ /ˈkombat/ and the verb ‘(to) combat’ /komˈbat/ which is based solely on stress.