<OT> New Posting: ROA-738

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 738-0505

A Level Playing Field: Perceptibility and Inflection in English Compounds

Robert Kirchner <kirchner at ualberta.ca>
Elena Nicoladis <elenan at ualberta.ca>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=738


Abstract:
To explain why English compounds generally avoid internal
inflectional suffixation (e.g. key-chain rather than keys-chain),
linguists have often invoked the Level Ordering Hypothesis
(Siegel 1979), i.e. that particular types of morphology,
in this case inflectional suffixation, are derivationally
ordered after compounding. However, a broad range of counterexamp
les and conceptual objections to Level Ordering have emerged.
We propose an alternative account, based on the observation
that certain English inflectional suffixes are more perceptible
than others (-ing > -s > -ed), and that these suffixes are
less crucial to lexical access and recovery of meaning than
corresponding root-final segments. This proposal was tested
in perception and production experiments. In the perception
experiment, compounds with a nonsense word as modifier (e.g.
dacks van, dacked van) were auditorily presented to 20 native
English speakers, who were asked to spell what they heard.
The participants omitted significantly more -ed than -s
or -ing. In the production experiment, we asked 22 native
English speakers to read these compounds. The speakers dropped
significantly more -ed than -s or -ing. Furthermore, they
dropped more of these sounds when they were spelled as affixes
than as part of the root (e.g. dacked van vs. dact van.
These results suggest that English speakers' avoidance or
inclusion of inflection in compounds is based not on Level
Ordering, but on perceptibility as well as the status of
the consonant as an affix.  We further present a formal
analysis capturing these factors in terms of Steriade's
(1999) Licensing-by-Cue proposal.

Comments: 
Keywords: level-ordering, compounds, inflection, perceptibility
Areas: Phonology,Morphology,Psycholinguistics,Phonetics
Type: Journal Article

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=738