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Phonetic lapse in American English -<i>ative</i>

Paper · 2019 · Juliet Stanton

Summary

The paper looks at variable stress in American English words ending in -ative. Nanni (1977) observed that -at- tends to be stressed after an obstruent or a cluster (invéstigàtive) and to stay unstressed after a vowel or sonorant (cúmulative). Later stress theory mostly ignored this, because English stress rarely depends on segment detail. Stanton confirms a version of this "Nanni effect" in a large set of -ative words transcribed in the OED, and shows it cannot be explained away by factors such as lexical frequency. She then argues that *Lapse, the constraint penalizing runs of unstressed material, should be measured in duration rather than by counting syllables. Longer gaps between stresses get heavier penalties, so stressing -at- becomes more attractive when the preceding consonants are long. Two experiments, in which speakers chose stress placements for nonce -ative words, support this account over purely segment-identity explanations (e.g. Davis 1988). Weaker parallel trends in -ization words suggest the effect is general. The result implies that rhythmic constraints in phonology can see fine-grained timing.

Key points

  • The paper contrasts two definitions of *Lapse:
    • syllabic: one violation per pair of unstressed syllables, following Gordon 2002;
    • phonetic: one violation per millisecond of unstressed material between two stressed vowels. This version is later revised so that only spans above a minimum duration are penalized.
  • The analysis also uses Stress-ive, a suffix-specific preference for stressing -ive, and a syllabic *Clash that forbids adjacent stresses. Together these allow -àtive or -atìve, but not both.
  • The data come from OED transcriptions plus two nonce-word preference experiments, approved under NYU IRB-FY-2017-707. Statistical model results are in an online appendix.
  • In -ization words, the consonants after the first stress matter: -ize- stress rates are 86% (vowel), 92% (sonorant), 96% (obstruent) and 98% (cluster), with p < .05 (Fisher's Exact Test).
  • Two other -ization comparisons show no clear effect:
    • Segments directly before -ize- show no effect (p > .1).
    • Clash across longer consonant strings trends the predicted way but is not significant (p = .08).

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Pit a count-based and a measurement-based version of the same constraint against each other, using cases where the two make different predictions (àbracadábra vs àbraskladábra).
  • I2. Use invented words to test whether a pattern is a productive generalization rather than memorized lexical behavior.
  • I3. Before claiming an effect, rule out confounds like lexical frequency that could produce the same surface pattern.
  • I4. Make a gradient penalty apply only past a minimum threshold, instead of penalizing every unit linearly.
  • I5. Check that a pattern found with one suffix (-ative) recurs with another (-ization) before treating it as general grammar.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (learn): build evaluation pairs where competing scoring hypotheses diverge, so a test can actually tell which rule the system has learned.
  • I2 (tokens): probe the lemmatizer and tagger with nonce derivatives such as made-up -ative/-ization forms, checking that suffix analysis generalizes beyond dictionary entries.
  • I3 (learn): add frequency-matched negative controls when judging whether a self-induced repair rule really captures structure.
  • I4 (tree): length-based penalties on dependency arcs in the perceptron parser could be thresholded the same way, so short arcs stay free and only unusually long ones are discouraged.
  • I5 (tokens): when a morphology heuristic is discovered on one affix, require it to replicate on a sibling affix before promoting it to a general rule in crate en.

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

🎓New York UniversityNew York · United States201 works · 100,180 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Juliet Stanton. 2019. Phonetic lapse in American English -<i>ative</i>. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.714

@article{stanton2019phonetic,
  title = {{Phonetic lapse in American English -<i>ative</i>}},
  author = {Juliet Stanton},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.714},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.714}
}

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  37. How to cite this article: Stanton, Juliet. 2019. Phonetic lapse in American English -ative. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4(1): 55. 1–37. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.714 ↗
  38. Accepted: 13 February 2019 find
  39. Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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