Surviving truncation: informativity at the interface of morphology and phonology

Abstract

When disyllabic words of Chinese are compounded, truncation often applies to yield a disyllabic output that draws one syllable from each of the contributing words, e.g., xiàdiē + fúdù → xiàdiē + fúdù → diēfú. A substantial portion of new words enter Chinese via this process, and all combinations of four underlying syllables are attested in disyllabic neologisms. Variation in which syllable of the base escapes truncation has been described as arbitrary, but our analysis uncovers a clear pattern. Informative syllables survive. We fit a logistic regression model to Chinese truncation patterns using two indices of informativity, constituent family size and frequency ratio. Both of these factors were significant predictors. To further explore the nature of informativity-based constraints on surface forms, we analysed the truncation probabilities predicted by the model for each base in the neologism corpus. As truncation probabilities increased so too did model accuracy. We interpret this result as evidence for a constraint regulating the degree of uncertainty in base-truncation mappings.

Phonology and orthography: The orthographic characterization of rendaku and Lyman’s Law

“…Although this proposal may seem rather radical, it did not come out of the blue- Vance (2007; repeatedly drew attention to the relevance of Japanese orthography in the patterning of rendaku, as we will see below in section 3.1. This proposal is also inspired by other work showing the interplay between orthographic and linguistic knowledge in shaping our phonological behaviors, which was reviewed in the introduction of this paper (Poser 1990;Nagano & Shimada 2014;Shaw et al 2014; see also Taft 2006).…”

“…At the same time though, this hypocoristic formation pattern is based on a bimoraic foot in that the outcome of the conversion is bimoraic (Poser 1990), as is the case with the argot pattern discussed by . Shaw et al (2014) found something essentially similar in Chinese: in order to account for compound truncation patterns in Chinese, it is crucial to consider Chinese characters as part of lexical representations. Shaw et al (2014) demonstrate that what survives in truncation is affected by the predictability of each compound member, and that "predictability" is arguably a crucial part of our linguistic knowledge (Hall et al 2016 for a recent overview).…”

“…Shaw et al (2014) found something essentially similar in Chinese: in order to account for compound truncation patterns in Chinese, it is crucial to consider Chinese characters as part of lexical representations. Shaw et al (2014) demonstrate that what survives in truncation is affected by the predictability of each compound member, and that "predictability" is arguably a crucial part of our linguistic knowledge (Hall et al 2016 for a recent overview). Shaw et al (2014), moreover, showed that the frequencies of Chinese characters are a good measure for quantifying their predictability, again suggesting that Chinese characters are an important part of the linguistic knowledge of Chinese speakers.…”

“…Shaw et al (2014) demonstrate that what survives in truncation is affected by the predictability of each compound member, and that "predictability" is arguably a crucial part of our linguistic knowledge (Hall et al 2016 for a recent overview). Shaw et al (2014), moreover, showed that the frequencies of Chinese characters are a good measure for quantifying their predictability, again suggesting that Chinese characters are an important part of the linguistic knowledge of Chinese speakers. Overall, this example too illustrates the importance of considering the interplay between orthographic knowledge and lexical/phonological knowledge.…”

“…For this theory to work out, one needs to assume that Japanese speakers' phonological mental representations contain kana representations (following Nagano & Shimada 2014;Shaw et al 2014), and that the phonetic component of Japanese knows how to phonetically implement kana letters, the system which is summarized in Table 1 below. In particular, the phonetic component of Japanese implements those elements with a dakuten mark as voiced obstruents.…”