The phonetics of newly derived words: Testing the effect of morphological segmentability on affix duration
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Date
2018
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
HHU
Abstract
Newly derived morphologically complex words have played a prominent
role in research on morphological productivity and lexical innovation (e.g.
Baayen 1989, 1996; Plag 1999; Mühleisen 2010). Most of the attention concerning
the properties of such words has been devoted to their phonological, morphological,
semantic and syntactic properties (see, for example, Bauer et al. 2013 for
such analyses). This paper takes a look at the phonetic properties of affixed
words, testing Hay’s (2003) ‘segmentability hypothesis’, according to which
newly derived words are expected to show less phonetic integration, hence less
phonetic reduction, of the affix involved than established forms. This hypothesis
is based on the idea that morphological segmentability negatively correlates with
phonological integration. To date there is only one study that clearly confirmed
the segmentability hypothesis (i.e. Hay 2007), while other studies have failed to
replicate the effect (see Hanique and Ernestus 2012 for an overview). The present
study investigates the issue with data from the Switchboard corpus for five affixes
of English: un-, locative in-, negative in-, dis- and adverbial -ly. Using different
measures of morphological segmentability, we demonstrate that the durations of
the two prefixes un- and dis- (unlike the durations of in- and -ly) largely support
the segmentability hypothesis. With un- and dis- prefixed words, prefixes that are
more easily segmentable have longer durations.
Description
Keywords
linguistics, morphology, phonology, phonetics, morphological segmentability, speech production, affixes, English
Citation
Plag, Ingo & Sonia Ben Hedia. 2018. The phonetics of newly derived words: Testing the effect of morphological segmentability on affix duration. In Sabine Arndt-Lappe, Angelika Braun, Claudine Moulin & Esme Winter-Froemel (eds.), Expanding the Lexicon: Linguistic Innovation, Morphological Productivity, and the Role of Discourse-related Factors, 93–116. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter Mouton.