UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Generalization of French and Portuguese plural alternations and initial syllable protection

Becker, M; Clemens, L; Nevins, AI; (2017) Generalization of French and Portuguese plural alternations and initial syllable protection. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory , 35 (2) pp. 299-345. 10.1007/s11049-016-9343-y. Green open access

[thumbnail of Nevins_art_10.1007_s11049-016-9343-y.pdf]
Preview
Text
Nevins_art_10.1007_s11049-016-9343-y.pdf

Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

We present two cases of morphophonological alternations in the plural of nouns, one from French and one from Brazilian Portuguese. In both of them, monosyllabic items are protected from right-edge alternations more than polysyllabic items are, an asymmetry we attribute to privileged protection of initial syllables. We implement the analyses of the two languages using constraint-based grammars that take trends learned across the lexicon and predict the treatment of nonce words. Five large-scale nonce word tasks confirm the productivity of the trend in both languages.

Type: Article
Title: Generalization of French and Portuguese plural alternations and initial syllable protection
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1007/s11049-016-9343-y
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11049-016-9343-y
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Keywords: Morphophonological alternations; Irregular plurals; Initial syllable faithfulness; Neighborhood density; Durational asymmetries
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Linguistics
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1498886
Downloads since deposit
114Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item