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120 results

Page 1 of 6

  • Is morphosyntactic agreement reflected in acoustic detail? The s duration of English regular plural nouns

  • MARCEL SCHLECHTWEG, GREVILLE G. CORBETT
  • Journal:
    English Language & Linguistics / Volume 27 / Issue 1 / March 2023
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    12 September 2022, pp. 67-92
    • Article
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  • Studies have challenged the assumption that different types of word-final s in English are homophonous. On the one hand, affixal (e.g. laps) and non-affixal s (e.g. lapse) differ in their duration; on the other hand, variation exists across several types of affixal s (e.g. between the plural (cars) and genitive plural (cars’)). This line of research was recently expanded in a study in which an interesting side effect appeared: the s was longer if followed by a past tense verb (e.g. The pods/odds eventually dropped), in comparison to a following present tense verb (e.g. The old screens/jeans obviously need replacing.). Put differently, the s became longer in the absence of overt morphosyntactic agreement, where it was mostly the sole plurality marker in the sentence. The objective of the present article is to examine whether this effect can be replicated in a more controlled setting. Having considered a large number of potential confounding variables in a reading experiment, we found an effect in the expected direction, one that is compatible with the literature on the impact that predictability has on duration. We interpret this finding against the background of the role of fine acoustic detail in language.

Morphological Complexity
  • Matthew Baerman, Dunstan Brown, Greville G. Corbett
  • Published online:
    13 July 2017
    Print publication:
    22 June 2017
  • Inflectional morphology plays a paradoxical role in language. On the one hand it tells us useful things, for example that a noun is plural or a verb is in the past tense. On the other hand many languages get along perfectly well without it, so the baroquely ornamented forms we sometimes find come across as a gratuitous over-elaboration. This is especially apparent where the morphological structures operate at cross purposes to the general systems of meaning and function that govern a language, yielding inflection classes and arbitrarily configured paradigms. This is what we call morphological complexity. Manipulating the forms of words requires learning a whole new system of structures and relationships. This book confronts the typological challenge of characterising the wildly diverse sorts of morphological complexity we find in the languages of the world, offering both a unified descriptive framework and quantitative measures that can be applied to such heterogeneous systems.

Page 1 of 6