Morpho-phonology and hierarchical morphological structure

Ingo Plag (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)
Morpho-phonology and hierarchical morphological structure

In the final lecture I will investigate the hypothesis that the internal bracketing of a word with more than two morphemes is reflected in the phonetic implementation in such a way that embedded forms show more phonetic reduction than forms at higher structural levels. I will present a study that tests the predictions derived from this hypothesis with tri-constituent compounds. The analysis of the durational properties of almost 500 compound tokens shows that certain effects can be found that indeed are indicative of the hierarchical structure and of the strength of the internal boundary of tri-constituent compounds. This means that morphological structure can be directly read off from the speech signal, an unexpected result for most, if not all, extant models morpho-phonology and speech production.