Ingo Plag
Düsseldorf University

Ingo Plag

Düsseldorf University
Germany

Morpho-Phonetics: The Role of the Acoustic Signal in Morphology

This tutorial is about the pronunciation of morphologically complex words. Traditional approaches to the role of sound structure in complex words have focused on phonologically conditioned allomorphy or on morphologically conditioned segmental or prosodic alternations (such as compound stress, stress shift, stress preservation, truncation, degemination, or syllabification, see, for example, Bauer et al. 2013: chapter 9). Such studies have detected interesting generalizations across sets of words but also exceptions to the observed regularities, and these findings have given rise to highly influential theoretical models like Lexical Morphology and Phonology (e.g. Kiparksy 1982), to far-reaching assumptions about the modular organization of grammar, and have informed modular models of speech production (e.g. Levelt et al. 1999, Roelofs & Ferreira 2019).

However, recent work on the acoustic properties of complex words has found that, quite unexpectedly, morphological information may also influence the phonetic properties of words, for example acoustic duration. For English, a number of studies have provided evidence for such effects on stems and affixes. For instance, Cohen (2014) investigated words with morphemic final [s] and [z] in English, and found that the duration of these sounds and the stems can vary dependent on morphological properties such as paradigmatic probability. Higher paradigmatic probability causes longer suffixes, as well as shorter stem durations. Zimmermann (2016), Plag, Homann & Kunter (2017), Seyfarth et al. 2017, Plag et al. (2020), Tomaschek et al. (2021), and Schmitz et al. (2021a) found systematic differences in the duration of morphologically different types of final S in English (e.g. non-morphemic, plural, genitive plural etc.).

The results of these studies seriously challenge established theories of morphology- phonology interaction, the common distinction between lexical and post-lexical phonology, and current theories of speech production.

In this tutorial we will look in detail at some pertinent research from my lab, and will discuss possible explanations for the observed morpho-phonetic effects. In particular, I will present three studies that have found paradigmatic effects in speech production, and will show how morpho-phonetic effects may be accounted for in a radically different approach to speech production, morphology and the lexicon, the Discriminative Lexicon (Baayen et al. 2019).