Prominence in Triconstituent Compounds: Pitch Contours and Linguistic Theory

Abstract

According to the widely accepted Lexical Category Prominence Rule (LCPR), prominence assignment to triconstituent compounds depends on the branching direction. Left-branching compounds, that is, compounds with a left-hand complex constituent, are held to have highest prominence on the left-most constituent, whereas right-branching compounds have highest prominence on the second of the three constituents. The LCPR is, however, only poorly empirically supported. The present paper tests a new hypothesis concerning the prominence of triconstituent compounds and suggests a new methodology for the empirical investigation of compound prominence. According to this hypothesis, the prominence pattern of the embedded compound has a decisive influence on the prominence of the whole compound. Using a mixed-effects generalized additive model for the analysis of the pitch movements, it is shown that all triconstituent compounds have an accent on the first constituent irrespective of branching, and that the placement of a second, or even a third, accent is dependent on the prominence pattern of the embedded compound. The LCPR is wrong.

Autocorrelated Errors in Experimental Data in the Language Sciences: Some Solutions Offered by Generalized Additive Mixed Models

“…However, as we shall see next, predictors may also lose significance as autocorrelational structure is brought into the model. Koesling et al (2012) were interested in the stress patterns of English three-constituent compounds, and measured the fundamental frequency of such compounds as realized by a sample of speakers.…”

“…For some participants, this nonindependence may stretch across 20 or more lags in time. Second, a study investigating the pitch contour realized on English three-constituent compounds (Koesling et al, 2012) is re-examined. As pitch changes relatively slowly and relatively continuously, autocorrelation structure is strongly present.…”

Multivariate Statistics

“…By way of example, consider a study of pitch (F0) in English tri-constituent compounds (Koesling et al, 2012). Three predictors are of interest here: Time, Sex (female versus male), and Branching.…”

“…The fitted smooths for Pitch as a function of Time, for each of the four branching conditions, is shown in Figure 7. For a discussion of the interpretation of these smooths, the reader is referred to (Koesling et al, 2012).…”

“…The importance of these factors is determined with the help of multiple regression modeling of data extracted from speech corpora. Koesling, Kunter, Baayen, and Plag (2012) used multivariate analysis to study the pitch contours of English tri-constituent compounds, with as predictors not only time and compound structure, but also speaker, word, a word's frequency of occurrence, and the speaker's sex. In morphology, the choice between two rival affixes can depend on a wide range of factors, as shown for various Russian affix pairs by Janda et al (2012).…”