Emergent faithfulness to morphological and semantic heads in lexical blends

Abstract

In many languages, sounds in certain "privileged" positions preserve marked structure which is eliminated elsewhere (Positional Faithfulness, Beckman 1998).  This paper presents new corpus and experimental evidence that faithfulness to main-stress location and segmental content of morpho-semantic heads emerges in English blends. The study compared right-headed (subordinating) blends, like motor + hotel -> motel (a kind of hotel) with coordinating blends like spoon + fork -> spork (equally spoon and fork).

Stress: Analysis of 1095 blends from Thurner (1993) found that right-headed blends were more faithful to stress location of the second source word than were coordinating blends.  Given source words with conflicting stress (e.g., FLOUNder + sarDINE), participants preferentially matched the blend that preserved second-word stress (flounDINE) to a right-headed definition.

Segmental content: When source-word length was controlled, segments from right-headed blends were more likely to survive than those from coordinating blends.  Given source words that could be spliced at two points (e.g., flaMiNGo + MoNGoose), participants preferentially matched the one that preserved more of the second word (flamongoose) to a right-headed definition.

These results support the hypotheses that Positional Faithfulness constraints are universally available, that heads are a privileged position, and that blend phonology is sensitive to headedness.