Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

Workshop 7 – Ron 195
Prominence and transparency in prosodic morphology
Lappe, Sabine
Siegen
lappe@anglistik.uni-siegen.de
Truncatory processes are traditionally held to lack transparency (both semantic and
morphological). The chief reason for the lack of semantic transparency is that the base form is
taken to be not easily or unambiguously recoverable from the truncated form. Thus, for
example, the English truncated personal name Will may be derived from Wilbert or William;
similarly, English mag may be derived either from magazine or from magnet. This lack of
recoverability has provided one of the major arguments to distinguish between processes like
truncation as instances of word-creation or extragrammatical morphology on the one hand and
word-formation proper or grammatical word-formation on the other hand.
In this paper I will look at recoverability of base words in truncatory processes from an
empirical perspective. It will be shown that from this perspective, recoverability - and, hence,
transparency - is much less a problem for the interpretation of truncated words than hitherto
assumed. The main bulk of data will come from English (Lappe 2005), where truncatory
processes - especially personal name truncation - are highly productive. The truncatory
patterns to be considered will be simple name truncation (e.g. Will < William), hypocoristic
formation (e.g. Willy < William), and clipping of other words, both unsuffixed (e.g. mag <
magnet, celeb < celebrity) and suffixed (e.g. chrissie < chrysanthemum).
On the basis of a corpus comprising more than 3,000 base-derivative pairs, we will first of all
see that, in practice, truncated forms posing recoverability problems are the exception rather
than the rule. Specifically, the assumption that truncation produces homophonous truncated
forms whose bases are unclear is true for only a very small minority of cases in the corpus.
Secondly, we will see that truncation processes systematically incorporate mechanisms that
facilitate recoverability of base forms, and, hence, transparency. These mechanisms crucially
involve the phonological prominence structure of the base form. For example, English
truncated names systematically vary between two options in terms of the segmental material
which they preserve from their bases. More than 90% of the pertinent data preserve either the
first or the main-stressed syllable of the base. Preservation of nonprominent material, which is
attested for highly frequent names like Elisabeth (truncated form: Beth), is very rare in the
corpus. Interestingly, the systematic patterns observed in truncation mirror what has been
found in psycholinguistic studies to be important for word recognition. Truncated forms
systematically preserve those parts of their bases that play a key role in lexical access.
In the second part of the paper the empirical findings from English will be compared to
findings that have emerged from studies of truncatory patterns in other languages. We will see
that English does not constitute an isolated case, but that, whenever systematic empirical
studies are available, these studies bring out the prominence structure of base forms as an
important factor that systematically determines which part of their bases truncated forms will
retain. The data will come from Spanish (PiZeros 1998), French (Ronneberger-Sibold 1992,
Scullen 1997, Nelson 2003), and Italian (Alber 2006, to appear).
With respect to the topic of the workshop, the findings to be presented in this paper raise
important theoretical issues. These not only concern the relation between transparency and
formal compositionality; they also crucially concern the question of what should count as
irregularity in morphology.