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Diachronic dynamics of Middle English phonotactics provide evidence for analogy effects among lexical and morphonotactic consonant clusters

Paper · 2016 · Andreas Baumann, Nikolaus Ritt and Christina Prömer

Summary

The paper asks whether word-final consonant clusters created by morphology compete with or reinforce identical clusters that occur inside morphemes. Examples are /nd/ in quicken+ed, which matches the /nd/ of hand, and /mz/ in seem+s. One view holds that a cluster marks a morpheme boundary best when it never appears lexically, so the two kinds should push each other apart. The other view holds that children absorb frequent boundary-spanning clusters before they analyse word structure, which would make the same clusters easier to accept inside morphemes. The authors traced word-final lexical and morphonotactic clusters across Middle and Early Modern English corpus data and modelled the trends quantitatively in two ways. Before about 1500, the cluster inventory changed in the way frequency-driven analogy during acquisition predicts. After 1500, no clear pattern emerged, and several shifts reflect morphosyntactic or sociolinguistic change. The result weakens the strict "boundary signal" account of morphonotactics. It suggests that language history involves two opposing forces, one favouring unambiguous clusters and one favouring ambiguous ones.

Key points

  • Two cluster types. Lexical (phonotactic) clusters sit inside a morpheme, as in hand, bulb and fast+est. Morphonotactic clusters span a boundary, as in quicken+ed and seem+s.
  • Clean boundary signal. ModE /md/ appears only in stem+ed forms such as seemed, so it marks the boundary reliably. /nd/ is a weak cue because it also occurs in hand, band, demand, behind and and.
  • Two models.
    • The first model gave an unexpected result: clusters of intermediate frequency became more lexical than the most frequent ones.
    • The second model located the timing. Before 1500, the inventory matched the analogy prediction. After 1500, no systematic pattern appeared.
  • Explaining the residue. Post-1500 deviations are attributed to phonology-external factors, namely inflectional reduction and standardization.
  • Prediction and funding. Boundary-spanning clusters with high token frequency should drift toward lexical status, and rare ones toward purely morphonotactic status. The work was funded by FWF grant P27592-G18 and OeAD grant PL8/2014.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Boundary reliability as a measurable property: a word-final sequence is a good morpheme-boundary cue only to the extent that it rarely occurs inside stems, and this degree of "lexicality" can be measured per sequence.
  • I2. Rival hypotheses with opposite predictions: the study pits an inhibition account against a support account that predict opposite directions of change on the same data, so the data can decide between them.
  • I3. Splitting by period to find where a pattern holds: the second model locates the point after which the effect stops, and the residue is then explained by named external factors rather than averaged away.
  • I4. Unanalysed chunks shaping internal rules: frequent multi-morpheme forms may be learned whole before their structure is recognised, and this can relax the constraints on morpheme-internal structure.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tokens): compute, for each word-final letter or phone sequence, the share of inflected versus base occurrences, and use it to weight suffix-stripping guesses for unknown words.
  • I2 (learn): when testing a new repair rule or teacher tier, state a competing hypothesis with the opposite expected effect and include it as a negative control in evaluation.
  • I3 (learn): evaluate self-induced rules separately per genre or source slice, so a rule that helps fables but hurts school texts is detected and its scope limited.
  • I4 (tokens): let the lemmatizer store high-frequency inflected forms as whole entries alongside rule-based analysis, and log when the two disagree as candidate repair cases.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of ViennaVienna · Austria7 works · 38,636 citations

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 463 works

🧭 Topics 3Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksMorphology · 277 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Andreas Baumann, Nikolaus Ritt and Christina Prömer. 2016. Diachronic dynamics of Middle English phonotactics provide evidence for analogy effects among lexical and morphonotactic consonant clusters. Papers in Historical Phonology 1.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.2218/pihph.1.2016.1693

@inproceedings{baumann2016diachronic,
  title = {{Diachronic dynamics of Middle English phonotactics provide evidence for analogy effects among lexical and morphonotactic consonant clusters}},
  author = {Andreas Baumann, Nikolaus Ritt and Christina Prömer},
  booktitle = {Papers in Historical Phonology 1},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.2218/pihph.1.2016.1693},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.2218/pihph.1.2016.1693}
}

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