Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T00:27:04.027Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Informativeness is a determinant of compound stress in English1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2012

MELANIE J. BELL  and
INGO PLAG
MELANIE J. BELL*
Affiliation:
Anglia Ruskin University
INGO PLAG*
Affiliation:
Universität Siegen
*
Authors' addresses: (Bell) Department of English, Communication, Film and Media, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge CB11PT, UK[email protected]
(Plag) Anglistik/Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Siegen, D-57068 Siegen, Germany[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

There have been claims in the literature that the variability of compound stress assignment in English can be explained with reference to the informativeness of the constituents (e.g. Bolinger 1972, Ladd 1984). Until now, however, large-scale empirical evidence for this idea has been lacking. This paper addresses this deficit by investigating a large number of compounds taken from the British National Corpus. It is the first study of compound stress variability in English to show that measures of informativeness (the morphological family sizes of the constituents and the constituents' degree of semantic specificity) are indeed highly predictive of prominence placement. Using these variables as predictors, in conjunction with other factors believed to be relevant (see Plag et al. 2008), we build a probabilistic model that can successfully assign prominence to a given construction. Our finding, that the more informative constituent of a compound tends to be most prominent, fits with the general propensity of speakers to accentuate important information, and can therefore be interpreted as evidence for an accentual theory of compound stress.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , November 2012 , pp. 485 - 520
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[1]

The authors wish to thank Sabine Arndt-Lappe, Kristina Kösling, Gero Kunter and three anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees for their feedback on earlier versions. Special thanks also to Harald Baayen for discussion and support. This work was made possible by an AHRC postgraduate award (114 200) and a major studentship from Newnham College, Cambridge, to the first author as well as two grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (PL151/5-1, PL 151/5-3) to the second author, all of which are gratefully acknowledged.

References

REFERENCES

Arndt-Lappe, Sabine. 2011. Towards an exemplar-based model of stress in English noun–noun compounds. Journal of Linguistics 47.3, 549–585.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald. 2005. Data mining at the intersection of psychology and linguistics. In Cutler, Anne (ed.), Twenty-first century psycholinguistics: Four cornerstones, 69–83. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald. 2008. Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald, Piepenbrock, Richard & Gulikers, Leon. 1995. The CELEX lexical database (CD-ROM). Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie. 1978. The grammar of nominal compounding with special reference to Danish, English and French (Odense University Studies in Linguistics 4). Odense: Odense University Press.Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie. 1983. Stress in compounds: A rejoinder. English Studies 64.1, 47–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bauer, Laurie. 1998. When is a sequence of two nouns a compound in English? English Language and Linguistics 2.1, 65–86.Google Scholar
Bell, Melanie J. 2005. Against nouns as syntactic premodifiers in English noun phrases. Working Papers in English and Applied Linguistics 11, 1–48. University of Cambridge, Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Bell, Melanie J. 2011. At the boundary of morphology and syntax: Noun noun constructions in English. In Galani, Alexandra, Hicks, Glynn & Tsoulas, George (eds.), Morphology and its interfaces, 137–167. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Bell, Melanie J. 2012. The English noun noun construct: Its prosody and structure. Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Bell, Melanie J. & Plag, Ingo. 2012. Within-type variation in English compound stress: Towards an explanation. Ms., Anglia Ruskin University & Universität Siegen.Google Scholar
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1935. Language. London: George Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight. 1972. Accent is predictable (if you're a mind-reader). Language 48.3, 633–644.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition). 2007. Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ (accessed 20 May 2012).Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam & Halle, Morris. 1968. The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2004–. BYU-BNC (based on the British National Corpus). http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/ (accessed 20 May 2012).Google Scholar
Farnetani, Edda, Torsello, Carol Taylor & Cosi, Piero. 1988. English compound versus non-compound noun phrases in discourse: An acoustic and perceptual study. Language and Speech 31.2. 157–180.Google Scholar
Fellbaum, Christiane (ed.). 1998. WordNet: An electronic lexical database. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fudge, Erik C. 1984. English word-stress. London: George Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Gagné, Christina L. 2001. Relation and lexical priming during the interpretation of noun–noun combinations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 27.1, 236–254.Google ScholarPubMed
Gagné, Christina L. & Shoben, Edward J.. 1997. Influence of thematic relations on the comprehension of modifier–noun combinations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 23.1, 71–87.Google Scholar
Giegerich, Heinz J. 2004. Compound or phrase? English noun-plus-noun constructions and the stress criterion. English Language and Linguistics 8.1, 1–24.Google Scholar
Gussenhoven, Carlos. 2004. The phonology of tone and intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gussenhoven, Carlos & Broeders, Ton. 1981. English pronunciation for student teachers. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff-LongmanGoogle Scholar
Hastie, Trevor J. & Tibshirani, Robert J.. 1990. Generalized additive models (Monographs on Statistics and Applied Probability 43). London: Chapman & Hall/CRC.Google Scholar
Jespersen, Otto. 1909. A modern English grammar on historical principles. Part 1, sounds and spellings. Heidelberg: Carl Winter's Universitätsbuchhandlung.Google Scholar
Jones, Daniel. 1972. An outline of English phonetics, 9th edn.Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons.Google Scholar
Kingdon, Roger. 1958. The groundwork of English stress. London: Longmans, Green & Co.Google Scholar
Krott, Andrea, Schreuder, Robert & Harald Baayen, R.. 2002. Linking elements in Dutch noun–noun compounds: Constituent families as analogical predictors for response latencies. Brain and Language 81.3, 708–722.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Krott, Andrea, Schreuder, Robert, Baayen, R. Harald & Dressler, Wolfgang U.. 2007. Analogical effects on linking elements in German compound words. Language and Cognitive Processes 22.1, 25–57.Google Scholar
Kunter, Gero. 2010. Perception of prominence patterns in English nominal compounds. Speech Prosody 2010 (102007), 1–4. http://speechprosody2010.illinois.edu/papers/102007.pdf (accessed 20 May 2012).Google Scholar
Kunter, Gero. 2011. Compound stress in English: The phonetics and phonology of prosodic prominence (Linguistische Arbeiten 539). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.Google Scholar
Kunter, Gero & Plag, Ingo. 2007. What is compound stress? In Trouvain, Jürgen & Barry, William J. (eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, University of Saarbrücken, 6–10 August 2007. Saarbrücken: Universität Saarbrücken.Google Scholar
Kutner, Michael H., Nachtsheim, Christopher J., Neter, John & Li, William. 2005. Applied linear statistical models, 5th edn. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill Irwin.Google Scholar
Ladd, D. Robert. 1984. English compound stress. In Gibbon, Dafydd & Richter, Helmut (eds.), Intonation, accent and rhythm: Studies in discourse phonology, 253–266. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Ladd, D. Robert. 2008. Intonational phonology, 2nd edn.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levi, Judith N. 1978. The syntax and semantics of complex nominals. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Liberman, Mark & Sproat, Richard. 1992. The stress and structure of modified noun phrases in English. In Sag, Ivan A. & Szabolcsi, Anna (eds.), Lexical matters (CSLI Lecture Notes 24), 131–181. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Lipka, Leonhard. 1994. Lexicalization and institutionalization. In Asher, Ronald E. (ed.), The encyclopedia of language and linguistics, vol. 4, 2164–2167. Oxford: Pergamon.Google Scholar
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. 1978. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Marchand, Hans. 1969. The categories and types of Present-day English word-formation: A synchronic–diachronic approach, 2nd edn.Munich: C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung.Google Scholar
Olsen, Susan. 2000. Compounding and stress in English: A closer look at the boundary between morphology and syntax. Linguistische Berichte 181, 55–70.Google Scholar
Ostendorf, Mari, Price, Patti & Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stefanie. 1996. Boston University Radio Speech Corpus. Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, 5th edn. 1995. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com (accessed 20 May 2012).Google Scholar
Pan, Shimei & Hirschberg, Julia. 2000. Modeling local context for speech accent prediction. The 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 233–240.Google Scholar
Pan, Shimei & McKeown, Kathleen R.. 1999. Word informativeness and automatic pitch accent modeling. Joint SIGDAT Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Very Large Corpora (EMNLP/VLC'99), 148–157.Google Scholar
Pennanen, Esko V. 1980. On the function and behaviour of stress in English noun compounds. English Studies 61.3, 252–263.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plag, Ingo. 2006. The variability of compound stress in English: Structural, semantic and analogical factors. English Language and Linguistics 10.1, 143–172.Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo. 2010. Compound stress assignment by analogy: The constituent family bias. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 29.2, 243–282.Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo & Kunter, Gero. 2010. Constituent family size and compound stress assignment in English. In Olsen, Susan (ed.), New impulses in word-formation (Linguistische Berichte Sonderheft 17), 349–382. Hamburg: Buske.Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo, Kunter, Gero & Lappe, Sabine. 2007. Testing hypotheses about compound stress assignment in English: A corpus-based investigation. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 3.2, 199–233.Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo, Kunter, Gero, Lappe, Sabine & Braun, Maria. 2008. The role of semantics, argument structure, and lexicalization in compound stress assignment in English. Language 84.4, 760–794Google Scholar
Sampson, Rodney. 1980. Stress in English N+N phrases: A further complicating factor. English Studies 61.3, 264–270.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schreuder, Robert & Baayen, R. Harald. 1997. How complex simplex words can be. Journal of Memory and Language 37.1, 118–139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shannon, Claude E. 1948. A mathematical theory of communication. The Bell System Technical Journal 27.3, 379–423 & 27.4, 623–656.Google Scholar
Skousen, Royal & Stanford, Theron. 2004. AM::Parallel (am2.3). Brigham Young University. http://humanities.byu.edu/am (accessed 20 May 2012).Google Scholar
Sweet, Henry. 1892. A new English grammar logical and historical. Pt. 1: Introduction, phonology and accidence. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Wood, Simon N. 2006. Generalized additive models: An introduction with R. London: Chapman and Hall/CRC.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold M. 1986. Forestress and afterstress. Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics 32, 46–62.Google Scholar