Homophony in morphology: the acoustic properties of morphemic and non-morphemic word-final S in English

Ingo Plag (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)
Homophony in morphology: the acoustic properties of morphemic and non-morphemic word-final S in English

In this lecture I will present an investigation that challenges the traditional assumption that homophonous suffixes are indeed phonetically non-distinct. The analysis of more than 600 tokens of non-morphemic /s/ and /z/, and of six different English /s/ and /z/ morphemes (plural, genitive, genitive-plural and 3rd person singular, as well as cliticized forms of has and is) shows that there are significant differences in acoustic duration between the seven categories. These findings challenge standard assumptions in morphological theory, Lexical Phonology and models of speech production.