This paper tests whether lemma frequency impacts the duration of homographic noun–verb homophones in spontaneous speech, e.g. cut (n)/cut (v). In earlier research on effects of lemma frequency (e.g. Gahl 2008), these pairs of words were not investigated due to a focus on heterographic homophones. Theories of the mental lexicon in both linguistics and psycholinguistics differ as to whether these word pairs are assumed to have shared or separate lexical representations. An empirical analysis based on spontaneous speech from the Buckeye corpus (Pitt et al. 2007) yields the result that differences in lemma frequency affect the duration of the N/V pairs under investigation. First, this finding provides evidence for N/V pairs having separate representations and thus supports models of the mental lexicon in which lexical entries are specified for word class. Second, the result is at odds with an account of ‘full inheritance’ of frequency across homophones and consequently with speech production models implementing inheritance effects via a shared form representation for homophonous words. The findings are best accounted for in a model that assumes completely separate lexical representations for homophonous words.

An important account of linear ordering in syntax is John A. Hawkins' (2004) theory of cognitive efficiency and the principles of domain minimization formulated therein. In its latest formulation, the theory postulates syntactic and semantic minimization principles. With regard to the relative strength of these principles, prior research into the dynamics of these constraints has come to differing conclusions. Using the relative ordering of prepositional phrases (PPs) in English as a test phenomenon, the present study contributes to the further development of a theory of syntactic serialization through the multifactorial analysis of naturalistic data from a corpus of present-day British English. We find that lexical-semantic dependency constitutes the strongest constraint on serialization followed by the weight-related, syntactic one. More specifically, our results show that although syntactic minimization has much greater data coverageit applies to a much larger proportion of the datathe lexical-semantic factor has a much greater effect size, thus is more seldomly violated. In addition to assessing the relative importance of the two minimization principles, we also investigate the effects of other potential codeterminants of PP order, namely the MANNER . PLACE . TIME generalization and pragmatic information status. Our results suggest that these play statistically significant but tangential roles in PP ordering.Research into syntactic constituent ordering has accumulated increasing evidence for the idea that language users tend to prefer constituent orders that impose fewer demands on (verbal) working memory (e.g.

In the study of the word-formation process of conversion, one particularly difficult task is to determine the directionality of the process, that is, to decide which word represents the base and which the derived word. One possibility to inform this decision that has received only limited attention is to capitalize on word-class-specific phonological properties. This paper empirically investigates this option for English noun-verb conversion by building on recent findings on phonological differences between these two word classes. A large-scale study of phonological properties is carried out on CELEX data, employing the quantitative techniques of conditional inference trees and random forests. An important result of this analysis is that the accuracy of phonological cues varies widely across different subsamples in the data. Essentially this means that phonological cues can be used as a criterion to determine the directionality of words that are at least two syllables in length. When restricted to this part of the lexicon, phonological properties represent a fairly accurate indicator of source word class and are therefore a useful addition to the linguist's toolkit for determining directionality in conversion. Based on this result, the paper also discusses the relations of phonological properties to other criteria commonly employed to determine directionality.

This article presents an analysis of the alternation between the bare and the full infinitive with the verb help in English. In particular, the influence of three general principles proposed to underlie this case of variation is investigated and discussed, viz. the complexity principle, the distance principle and avoidance of identity effects. A multifactorial analysis of corpus data from the BNC, which allows for the determination of the different strengths of determinants, reveals that the present alternation is governed to a large degree by horror aequi, the avoidance of identity on the lexical level.

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