Creoles, interlanguages, processing and transfer: A response to Sprouse

1. Introduction In his article in the first issue of this journal, Rex A. Sprouse (2009) presents a critique of two of my recent papers (Plag 2008a, 2008b) in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, in which I put forward the hypothesis that creoles are conventionalized interlanguages of an early stage. Sprouse’s critique would deserve a detailed treatment, which however, due to the space limitations imposed on this response, has to wait for another occasion. It may be worthwhile, however..

Words: structure, meaning, acquisition, processing

By bringing together experts of various scientific domains and different theoretical inclinations, the second NetWordS Summer school contributed to advance the current awareness of theoretical, typological, psycholinguistic, computational and neurophysiological evidence on the structure and processing of words, with a view to fostering novel methods of research and assessment for grammar architecture and language physiology

How morphological structure affects phonetic realisation in English compound nouns

Many studies have shown that syntagmatic and paradigmatic aspects of morphological structure may have an impact on the phonetic realisation of complex words (e.g. Cohen 2014a,b; Kuperman et al. 2007; Lee-Kim et al. 2013; Lõo et al. 2018; Plag et al. 2017; Schuppler et al. 2012; Smith et al. 2012; Sproat and Fujimura 1993; Zimmermann 2016, among many others). The majority of these studies have been concerned with affixes, often focusing on the acoustic properties of segments at a morphological boundary. The present study extends this line of investigation to compounds, exploring the extent to which consonant duration at compound-internal boundaries in English is dependent on morphological structure. Three competing hypotheses about the relationship between fine phonetic detail and morphological structure are tested. According to the Segmentability Hypothesis, greater morphological segmentability, i.e. a stronger morphological boundary, leads to acoustic lengthening (Ben Hedia and Plag 2017; Hay 2003; Plag and Ben Hedia 2018). The Informativity Hypothesis, on the other hand, states that higher informativity leads to lengthening (e.g. Jurafsky et al. 2001; van Son and Pols 2003). Finally, the Paradigmatic Support Hypothesis says that stronger paradigmatic support leads to lengthening (Cohen 2014b; Kuperman et al. 2007). To test these hypotheses, an experimental study was carried out using 62 compound types taken from the British National Corpus. The compounds were spoken by 30 speakers, yielding more than 1500 acoustic tokens overall. The data provide no support for the Segmentability Hypothesis, and only limited support for the Informativity Hypothesis. In contrast, the Paradigmatic Support Hypothesis makes correct predictions: consonant duration at compound-internal boundaries is positively correlated with the probability of the relevant consonant following the first noun, and the duration of compound-internal geminate consonants is negatively correlated with the family size of the first noun. In other words, longer durations are associated with lower paradigmatic diversity

Word knowledge in a cross-disciplinary world

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The lexeme in descriptive and theoretical morphology

After being dominant during about a century since its invention by Baudouin de Courtenay at the end of the nineteenth century, morpheme is more and more replaced by lexeme in contemporary descriptive and theoretical morphology.  The notion of a lexeme is usually associated with the work of P. H. Matthews (1972, 1974), who characterizes it as a lexical entity abstracting over individual inflected words. Over the last three decades, the lexeme has become a cornerstone of much work in both inflectional morphology and word formation (or, as it is increasingly been called, lexeme formation). The papers in the present volume take stock of the descriptive and theoretical usefulness of the lexeme, but also adress many of the challenges met by classical lexeme-based theories of morphology

The lexeme in descriptive and theoretical morphology

After being dominant during about a century since its invention by Baudouin de Courtenay at the end of the nineteenth century, morpheme is more and more replaced by lexeme in contemporary descriptive and theoretical morphology.  The notion of a lexeme is usually associated with the work of P. H. Matthews (1972, 1974), who characterizes it as a lexical entity abstracting over individual inflected words. Over the last three decades, the lexeme has become a cornerstone of much work in both inflectional morphology and word formation (or, as it is increasingly been called, lexeme formation). The papers in the present volume take stock of the descriptive and theoretical usefulness of the lexeme, but also adress many of the challenges met by classical lexeme-based theories of morphology

The lexeme in descriptive and theoretical morphology

After being dominant during about a century since its invention by Baudouin de Courtenay at the end of the nineteenth century, morpheme is more and more replaced by lexeme in contemporary descriptive and theoretical morphology.  The notion of a lexeme is usually associated with the work of P. H. Matthews (1972, 1974), who characterizes it as a lexical entity abstracting over individual inflected words. Over the last three decades, the lexeme has become a cornerstone of much work in both inflectional morphology and word formation (or, as it is increasingly been called, lexeme formation). The papers in the present volume take stock of the descriptive and theoretical usefulness of the lexeme, but also adress many of the challenges met by classical lexeme-based theories of morphology