Recent research has shown that homophonous lexemes show systematic phonetic differences (e.g. Gahl 2008, Drager 2011), with important consequences for models of speech production such as Levelt et al. (1999). These findings also pose the question of whether similar differences hold for allegedly homophonous affixes (instead of free lexemes). Earlier experimental research found some evidence that morphemic and non-morphemic sounds may differ acoustically (Walsh & Parker 1983, Losiewicz 1992). This paper investigates this question by analyzing the phonetic realization of non-morphemic /s/ and /z/, and of six different English /s/ and /z/ morphemes (plural, genitive, genitive-plural and 3rd person singular, as well as cliticized forms of has and is). The analysis is based on more than 600 tokens extracted from conversational speech (Buckeye Corpus, Pitt et al. 2007). Two important results emerge. First, there are significant differences in acoustic duration between some morphemic /s/’s and /z/’s and non-morphemic /s/ and /z/, respectively. Second, there are significant differences in duration between some of the morphemes. These findings challenge standard assumptions in morphological theory, lexical phonology and models of speech production.

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This paper tests three factors that have been held to be responsible for the variable stress behavior of noun-noun constructs in English: argument structure, semantics, and analogy. In a large-scale investigation of some 4500 compounds extracted from the CELEX lexical database (Baayen et al. 1995), we show that traditional claims about noun-noun stress cannot be upheld. Argument structure plays a role only with synthetic compounds ending in the agentive suffix -er. The semantic categories and relations assumed in the literature to trigger rightward stress do not show the expected effects. As an alternative to the rule-based approaches, the data were modeled computationally and probabilistically using a memory-based analogical algorithm (TiMBL 5.1) and logistic regression, respectively. It turns out that probabilistic models and the analogical algorithm are more successful in predicting stress assignment correctly than any of the rules proposed in the literature. Furthermore, the results of the analogical modeling suggest that the left and right constituent are the most important factor in compound stress assignment. This is in line with recent findings on the semi-regular behavior of compounds in other languages.

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