Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1360674313000154How to cite this article: SABINE ARNDT-LAPPE and INGO PLAG (2013). The role of prosodic structure in the formation of English blends. English Language and Linguistics,17, This article investigates a variety of ways in which prosodic factors influence blend structure in English. Recent approaches no longer consider blends unpredictable, but the role of stress in blend formation has not been investigated in detail yet. This article addresses this problem, focusing on the role of stress in determining the switchpoint of the two bases in the blend, and on the question of what determines the stress pattern of the blend. We investigate these questions using experimentally derived forms, coined by native speakers on the basis of carefully controlled word pairs as stimuli. The results demonstrate that the length of the blend, the location of the switchpoint, and the stress of the blend are crucially determined by stress properties of the two base words of the blend, above all by those of the second word. At a theoretical level, the most important single finding is that preservation of the stress of the second word may happen independently of preservation of segmental material of the stressed syllable (e.g. préstitant from prestígious + dóminant). In contrast to stress, and contrary to earlier claims, syllabic constituency is shown to be of minor importance for switchpoint location. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. On a methodological level, our results show that experimentally elicited blends constitute a valid and highly useful resource for research on blend structure. 1 The authors thank the audiences at several conferences for useful discussions of earlier versions: Manchester Phonology Meeting, May 2012; Data-rich Approaches to English Morphology, Wellington, July 2012; 35. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, Postdam, March 2013.We are also very grateful for the feedback provided by the two anonymous ELL reviewers and the editor Bernd Kortmann. Special thanks to Manel Ben Abdallah for developing this project with us and for collecting the data, and to Ute Raffelsiefer for her help with the final coding of the data.

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0022226711000028How to cite this article: SABINE ARNDT-LAPPE (2011). Towards an exemplar-based model of stress in English noun-noun compounds.

Rivalry between the two English nominalising suffixes -ityand -nesshas long been an issue in the literature on English word-formation (see esp. Marchand 1969; Aronoff 1976; Anshen & Aronoff 1981; Romaine 1983; Riddle 1985; Giegerich 1999; Plag 2003; Säily 2011; Baeskow 2012; Lindsay 2012; Baueret al. 2013: ch. 12). Both regularly attach to adjectival bases, producing nouns with (mostly) synonymous meanings. Most standard accounts assume that stronger restrictiveness of -ityis an effect of -itybeing less productive than -ness, and that the observed preferences are an effect of selectional restrictions imposed on bases and/or suffixes. The focus of the present study is on the productivity of the two suffixes in synchronic English and on the diachronic development of that productivity in the recent history of the language. The article presents a statistical analysis and a computational simulation with an analogical model (using the AM algorithm, Skousen & Stanford 2007) of the distribution of -ityand -nessin a corpus comprising some 2,700 neologisms from theOxford English Dictionaryfrom three different centuries (the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth). Statistical analysis of theOEDdata reveals that -itypreference for pertinent bases is far more widespread than hitherto thought. Furthermore, the earlier data show a consistent development of these preference patterns over time. Computational modelling shows that AM is highly successful in predicting the variation in synchronic English as well as in the diachronic data solely on the basis of the formal properties of the bases of nominalisation. On the basis of a detailed analysis of the AM model it is shown that, unlike many previous approaches, an analogical theory of word-formation provides a convincing account of the observed differences between the productivity profiles of the two nominalising suffixes and their emergence over time.

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