Emergent positional privilege in novel English blends

Moreton, Elliott; Smith, Jennifer L.; Pertsova, Katya; Broad, Rachel; Prickett, Brandon

doi:10.1353/lan.2017.0017

Cited by 13 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…The difference here only trends in a paired t-test: t(17) = -1.830, p = 0.085. 16 To conclude, the blending facts from Moreton et al (2017) with respect to nouns vs. proper nouns and verbs vs. nouns are consistent with the frequency story developed here.…”

Section: Englishsupporting

confidence: 76%

“…20 In this and the following analysis we do add-one smoothing on the independent measure to avoid taking the log of 0. We then turned to the noun vs. verb and proper noun vs. noun distinctions treated in Moreton et al (2017) and saw that, given the specific items used in the relevant experiments, those results are also consistent with a frequency effect.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…It also means that they are more varied phonologically than other categories. 1 Moreton et al (2017) expand on this result demonstrating emergent category effects in English that also distinguish proper names; specifically, proper names are more faithful to the input than other nouns. They do this experimentally, using a word-blending task.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 73%

“…

In this paper we investigate category-specific effects through the lens of Welsh mutation. Smith (2011) and Moreton et al (2017) show that English distinguishes nouns and proper nouns in an experimental blending task. Here we show that Welsh distinguishes nouns, verbs, personal names, and place names in the mutation system.

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confidence: 99%

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Category-specific effects in Welsh mutation

Hammond

Bell

Anderson

et al. 2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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In this paper we investigate category-specific effects through the lens of Welsh mutation. Smith (2011) and Moreton et al. (2017) show that English distinguishes nouns and proper nouns in an experimental blending task. Here we show that Welsh distinguishes nouns, verbs, personal names, and place names in the mutation system. We demonstrate these effects experimentally in a translation task designed to elicit mutation intuitions and in several corpus studies. In addition, we show that these effects correlate with lexical frequency. Deeper statistical analysis and a review of the English data suggests that frequency is a more explanatory factor than part of speech in both languages. We therefore argue that these category-specific effects can be reduced to lexical frequency effects.

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Section: Englishsupporting

confidence: 76%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 73%

“…

…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Category-specific effects in Welsh mutation

Hammond

Bell

Anderson

et al. 2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…As such, they can also demonstrate the influence of putative universal constraints which are active in other phonologies but are not otherwise observable in English. As one recent example: Moreton et al (2017) find that faithfulness to nouns and head nouns makes sense of English speaker intuitions about the meanings of blends, despite a lack of an observable noun faithfulness effect elsewhere in the phonology of English.…”

mentioning

confidence: 96%

Vowel but not consonant identity and the very informal English lexicon

Tessier

Becker

2018

AMP

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This paper studies the phonological properties of shitgibbons, a class of insulting English compounds made up of a monosyllabic obscenity followed by a trochaic innocuous noun. Our experimental data shows that in addition to these categorical prosodic requirements, there are gradient segmental requirements: native speakers judge shitgibbons as more wellformed when their two stressed vowels are identical (e.g. shit-whistle is better than fuck-whistle), but matching word-initial consonants do not improve wellformedness. A corpus study of English compounds shows that both vowel identity and initial consonant identity are overrepresented in the lexicon. Our explanation for the mismatch between the lexicon and the experiment relies on a typological asymmetry: vowels interact across intervening consonants in many languages, but consonants do not selectively interact across other intervening consonants in this way, e.g. the two matching [f]’s in fuck-frisbee cannot be compelled to match while ignoring the intervening coda [k]. The analysis is implemented as a MaxEnt grammar, with a locality bias that prevents assigning weight to the constraint that demands initial consonant matching.

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The role of heads and cyclicity in bracketing paradoxes in Armenian compounds

Dolatian

2020

Morphology

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Emergent positional privilege in novel English blends

Cited by 13 publications

References 53 publications

Category-specific effects in Welsh mutation

Category-specific effects in Welsh mutation

Vowel but not consonant identity and the very informal English lexicon

The role of heads and cyclicity in bracketing paradoxes in Armenian compounds

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