A Study of Element Ordering in English Coordinate Lexical Items (original) (raw)

Crosslinguistic correlations between size of syllables, number of cases, and adposition order

Previous crosslinguistic studies by the authors have shown that a small number of phonemes per syllable is associated with a high number of syllables per word and per clause, and, moreover, with Object-Verb (OV) order and agglutinative morphology. And since OV order is often connected with a tendency to postpositions (e.g. Greenberg 1966) and agglutinative morphology with both a tendency to postpositions and a tendency to a higher number of cases, the present study investigates the assumption of crosslinguistic correlations between these two tendencies and between them and our "metric" variables mean size of syllables in terms of phonemes and mean size of clauses in terms of syllables.

Syllable Structure and the Distribution of Phonemes in English Syllables

Journal of Memory and Language, 1997

In describing the phonotactics (patterning of phonemes) of English syllables, linguists have focused on absolute restrictions concerning which phonemes may occupy which slots of the syllable. To determine whether probabilistic patterns also exist, we analyzed the distributions of phonemes in a reasonably comprehensive list of uninflected English CVC (consonant-vowelconsonant) words, some 2001 words in all. The results showed that there is a significant connection between the vowel and the following consonant (coda), with certain vowel-coda combinations being more frequent than expected by chance. In contrast, we did not find significant associations between the initial consonant (onset) and the vowel. These findings support the idea that English CVC syllables are composed of an onset and a vowel-coda rime. Implications for lexical processing are discussed. ᭧ 1997 Academic Press

Phoneme distribution and syllable structure of entry words in the CMU English Pronouncing Dictionary

Journal of the Korean society of speech sciences, 2016

This study explores the phoneme distribution and syllable structure of entry words in the CMU English Pronouncing Dictionary to provide phoneticians and linguists with fundamental phonetic data on English word components. Entry words in the dictionary file were syllabified using an R script and examined to obtain the following results: First, English words preferred consonants to vowels in their word components. In addition, monophthongs occurred much more frequently than diphthongs. When all consonants were categorized by manner and place, the distribution indicated the frequency order of stops, fricatives, and nasals according to manner and that of alveolars, bilabials and velars according to place. These results were comparable to the results obtained from the Buckeye Corpus (Yang, 2012). Second, from the analysis of syllable structure, two-syllable words were most favored, followed by three-and one-syllable words. Of the words in the dictionary, 92.7% consisted of one, two or three syllables. This result may be related to human memory or decoding time. Third, the English words tended to exhibit discord between onset and coda consonants and between adjacent vowels. Dissimilarity between the last onset and the first coda was found in 93.3% of the syllables, while 91.6% of the adjacent vowels were different. From the results above, the author concludes that an analysis of the phonetic symbols in a dictionary may lead to a deeper understanding of English word structures and components.

Syllable frequency in lexical decision and naming of English words

Reading and Writing, 2007

The importance of phonological syllables in recognition and pronunciation of visual words has been demonstrated in languages with a high degree of spelling-sound correspondence. In Spanish, multisyllabic words with frequent first syllables are named more quickly than those with less frequent first syllables, but receive slower lexical decisions. The latter effect is attributed to lexical competition from other words beginning with the same syllable. We examined syllable frequency effects on naming and lexical decision for 3,029 visually-presented words in English, a language with a high degree of irregularity in spelling/sound relationships, and in which phonological syllables are less clearly marked in printed words. The results showed facilitative effects of syllable frequency in both tasks, and these were stronger when syllables were defined orthographically than phonologically. The results suggest that activation of lexical candidates based on a syllabic code does not occur rapidly enough to interfere with lexical decision in English.

The Prosody and Quantity of English Compounds

Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, 2015

Following the earlier works of Booij (1985) and Nespor & Vogel (1986) I provide further evidence that English compounds are made up of prosodic words. The length of the first components must be preserved because of the principle of strict cyclicity - the first components in English are identical to basic lexical forms. In some other languages, as for example in Serbian, the length of the first components may be shortened because the inclusion of linking vowel can contribute to the building of the required ’derived environment’ (Kiparsky 1985). The invoking of the strict cyclicity condition is however necessary only in case when the accented syllables in English are not necessarily closed as claimed by J.C. Wells in the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary.

Intuitions for phonological constraints in binomials: A psycholinguistic investigation

Binomials (e.g., spic and span; hanky-panky) are lexicalized sequences of two or more constituents whose irreversible order is determined by semantic and phonological factors (Benor and Levy, 2006; Cooper and Ross, 1975). As an extension of early psycholinguistic work (Pinker and Birdsong, 1979) the present experimental study examines speakers' sensitivities to proposed phonological constraints on constituent ordering in binomials. Intuitions for preferred constituent order by native English and French speakers, and those of advanced L2 English and L2 French speakers, were elicited with a computer-based judgment task, using pairs of nonsense sequences, structured in such a way that one expression conforms to a specific constraint, and the other violates it (e.g., rigster and ragster vs. *ragster and rigster). The constraints in question involve quality and number of consonants, and quality and length of vowels in constituent elements of binomials. Experimental results revealed that the intuitions of native English speakers were generally more in line with the proposed constraints than those of native French speakers. Further, the intuitions of advanced nonnative speakers of both languages were overall not significantly different from those of natives, suggesting that subtle nativelike sensitivities to the phonological constraints in question may be acquired. A planned analysis revealed that intuitions are similar for coordinated type (e.g., wheeling and dealing) and hyphenated (reduplicative) type (e.g., razzle-dazzle) items, a heretofore unexplored distinction. A further analysis showed that participants displayed sensitivities to vowel quality and coda complexity. The result partially concords with accounts on invariable word order that derive from principles of phonoiconicity and markedness (Birdsong, 1979; Sobkowiak, 1993).