Does branching direction determine prominence assignment? An empirical investigation of triconstituent compounds in English

Kösling, Kristina; Plag, Ingo

doi:10.1515/cllt.2009.009

Cited by 27 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…No other criteria were employed. In particular, prosodic marking such as reported by Kösling and Plag (2009) for nominal compounds, was not taken into consideration. The few cases where there was disagreement among the consultants or where the meaning of the NP was ambiguous or opaque were discarded.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recursion introduces a left-branching bias (where possible)

Berg¹

2011

Linguistics

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Capitalizing upon the recursive nature of Saxon Genitives in English, this note examines the constituent structure of double Saxon Genitives such as ( he took) my sister-in-law's child's life. An analysis of 200 cases from both the spoken and the written modality reveals a distribution of 70% left branching and 30% right branching. This left-branching bias exists in the face of a general rightbranching preference in English. It is argued that left branching stems from the recursive structure of the Saxon Genitive. As listeners and readers take in the acoustic signal, they apply probabilistic decoding strategies and expect the more frequent nonrecursive Saxon Genitive to come up. Thus, the first two lexemes are treated as sister constituents. This introduces an advantage for left branching because such a configuration can be easily expanded into a double Saxon Genitive. By contrast, a right-branching structure leads the listener up the garden path. Branching direction in double Saxon Genitives is also found to be influenced by the animacy of their constituents. An animate possessor amplifies the left-branching bias whereas an inanimate possessor increases the incidence of right branching.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recursion introduces a left-branching bias (where possible)

Berg¹

2011

Linguistics

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“…Here I assess the claim, expressed in Liberman & Prince's (1977) It is of course clear that such stress patterns for NNNs exist: examples such as those in (2), as well as others cited in the literature from Chomsky & Halle (1968) to Liberman & Prince (1977) and Liberman & Sproat (1992), are compelling. Similarly, in the first empirical investigation of its kind, Kösling & Plag (2009) find that in the Boston University Radio Speech Corpus, the majority of NNNs overall conform with the CSR's predictions, although the CSR is also violated in a substantial number of cases. For example among [NN]N forms, end-stress is found to be quite common (living room táble).…”

Section: The Myth and The Factsmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…It does seem to be the case that the patterns predicted by the CSR are particularly frequent: Kösling & Plag's (2009) corpus sample shows this quite clearly. But this fact tells us nothing about the grammaticality of the other six patterns, however rare some of those may be.…”

Section: Analyses 2 and 3: All Nns Are Or May Be Compoundsmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…And Hayes (1981) argued that Liberman & Prince's CSR supported his theory of extrametricality, while Liberman & Sproat (1992: 147) at least regarded the predictions made by the formalism of the day as 'fairly well verified', a claim then also endorsed -if more cautiously: see section 3.2 below -by Kvam (1990) and by Kösling & Plag's (2009) recent study of relevant corpus evidence.…”

Section: Introduction: the Mythmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The English compound stress myth

Giegerich

2009

Word Structure

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This study investigates the distribution of end-stress and fore-stress among English NN and NNN compounds. It finds that end-stress in NNs is not ‘exceptional’, as many researchers have claimed, but confined to a reasonably well defined class of attribute-head NNs within which it is (at least optionally) grammatical and often predictable. In NNNs – NNs with embedded NNs – both fore-stress and end-stress can occur in both the embedding and the embedded NN, giving rise to eight possible stress patterns, all of which are attested. Moreover, the distribution of fore-stress and end-stress in embedding and embedded NNs follows the regularities identified in free-standing NNs. There is therefore no reason to accept the generalization whereby in NNNs, the second element is always stressed under right-branching and the first element under left-branching. While such patterns are perhaps particularly frequent, all others are also grammatical: the Compound Stress Rule known in the literature for some fifty years, deriving stress patterns from structural geometry, is wrong.

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“…Warren 1978; Krott et al 2004;Kösling & Plag 2009). Nominal compounding is also recursive in English.…”

Section: Theoretical Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Branching direction in recursive structures

Berg

2012

English Language and Linguistics

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English makes regular use of a number of recursive structures spanning the syntax-lexicon continuum. While NPs with recursive relative clauses occupy the syntactic end, nominal compounds are located at the lexical end. In between these extremes we find NPs with recursive periphrastic genitives (towards the syntactic end) and NPs with recursive Saxon genitives (towards the lexical end). This study presents a comparative analysis of the branching direction preferences in these recursive structures. The empirical focus is on double of-genitives, which exhibit an overwhelming predilection for right-branching. This contrasts sharply with the double Saxon genitives, which gravitate towards left-branching. The branching direction decision is argued to be under the sway of several distinct factors: a syntactic factor controlling the alternative between leftward and rightward expansion; a lexical factor regulating the idiomatization of a given pair of elements; and a processing factor geared towards preventing garden path effects. Furthermore, branching direction is determined by listeners' desire to minimize constituent recognition domains. Taken together, these factors are held accountable for the varying branching direction biases found in the different types of NP.

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Does branching direction determine prominence assignment? An empirical investigation of triconstituent compounds in English

Cited by 27 publications

References 15 publications

Recursion introduces a left-branching bias (where possible)

Recursion introduces a left-branching bias (where possible)

The English compound stress myth

Branching direction in recursive structures

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