Re: Verb-second ... verb-penultimate languages?

Tristan Alexander McLeay wrote:
> Well---and take this as devil's advocate, not me telling you you're
> wrong about your own speech---_"shoe%string_ is a compound composed of
> two morphemes both of which underlyingly possesss stress. It's like
> _"tooth%brush_; no-one would reduce the second syllable to [@] (unless
> that's what "brush" has anyway, but that's not reduction). But
> _"lightning_ would have (for me) a [@] except that it ends in a velar,
> which much prefers unstressed [I] instead. (Well, your English
> probably works differently from mine in this regard; I expect they do
> in so many other ways anyway.)
Even if so, *are* there any disyllabic or polysyllabic verbs in English
ending in -ing, other than "lightning"*, that aren't compound words such
as "shoestring"?  I can't think of any, which makes this putative rule
apply to only a single verb in the entire English language!

*It occurs to me that "lightning", at least in my mind, parses to an
irregular contraction of "lighten" + "ing", since the lightning bolts
"lighten" the night sky.  That could, conceivably, be another reason for
the idiomatic reduction, since otherwise you'd have the morpheme -ing
doubled.

Incidentally, for me, I have [iN] in the suffix -ing.  I've always
considered it to be phonemically /iN/ rather than the more common
transcription /IN/, though, very carefully listening to myself pronounce
triplets such as "seen/sing/sin", I realize that it has the quality of
/i/, but the duration of /I/, i.e., something like [si:n ~ siN ~ sIn].
I still think of it as an allophone of /i/, simply because that's what
it sounds like to me.