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Graphemic alternations in English as a reflex of morphological structure

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Abstract

Graphemic alternations such as <y>-replacement (e.g. <lady–ladies>) are obligatory in inflectional processes, but they do not occur in compounding (cf. <ladybug, *ladibug>). In derivational processes, the obligatoriness varies depending on the suffix (cf. <happiness, puppydom>). This variation in graphemic alternations is used to determine the juncture strength of derivational products. On the basis of the 450 million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (CoCA), 46 suffixes are investigated. The resulting scale is found to correlate closely with the type parsing ratio from Hay and Baayen (in Yearbook of Morphology 2001, pp. 203–235, 2002), a purely morphological measure. As the graphemic alternations investigated are not mirrored in phonology, the results are taken to be an argument for a partly autonomous writing system that can in turn be used to argue for or against morphological structure, quite like phonological sandhi or liaison phenomena.

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Notes

  1. Even though there is no phonological difference, there is a systematic phonetic difference between paradigmatically related stems, as one anonymous reviewer kindly points out. Kemps et al. (2005) show that for both agent nouns and comparatives (e.g. banker, thicker), the stem is shorter in duration than when it is produced in isolation. Moreover, listeners are sensitive to this difference.

  2. Note that <e> does in these cases not fulfil any other function, such as marking the preceding vowel as tense (as in e.g. <late>, <time>, <cope>).

  3. Of course, if the relationship between spoken and written language is to be analyzed as unbiased as possible, these categories have to be defined without the aid of their phonological counterparts. This is indeed feasible for the vowel/consonant letter distinction, and on this basis, graphemic syllables can be defined (cf. Berg 2012; see also Schmidt to appear). Graphemic words, on the other hand, are usually defined as written entities flanked by spaces or certain punctuation marks (cf. e.g. Nunberg et al. 2002).

  4. The declaration of parallelism does not imply equality in all respects, however (but cf. Aronoff 1989). A major systematic difference between the two systems (as opposed to differences in the acquisition of reading/writing and hearing/speaking, which are irrelevant here) is that phonology has a much more palpable effect on morphology than writing. To name but one example, there are numerous affixes that restrict their possible bases on phonological grounds; -al requires the base to be stressed on the final syllable, -en only attaches to monosyllabic bases and so forth. At least for English and German, there seem to be no similar graphemic selectional restrictions.

  5. Leaving out recent borrowings, in the CELEX database (Baayen et al. 1995) there are 373 monomorphemic words with word-internal <y> (out of all 12,772 monomorphemic words). On the other hand, there are only 70 words with word-final <i>. Most of them are either proper names (e.g. Farsi, Delphi, Haiti), names for inhabitants or regions (e.g. Somali, Swazi), or words of mostly Latin (e.g. alibi), Italian (e.g. confetti), Hindi (e.g. dhoti), or Arab (e.g. mufti) origin.

  6. The functional explanation laid out above thus favours the segmentation <ladie> + <s> over the possible alternative <ladi> + <es> (e.g. Bauer et al. 2013: 52).

  7. Friederich (1965) also points out the fact that the obvious exceptions <likelihood>, <livelihood>, and <hardihood> are all de-adjectival nominalizations (as opposed to the de-nominal nominalizations -hood usually attaches to), and as such they are exceptions. This pattern also occurs with other suffixes (see Sect. 5.1).

  8. There are very few counterexamples to this type, and these are either old, lexicalized compounds (<handicraft>, <handiwork>) or marginal spelling variants (<pantihose> is attested only twice in CoCA, the alternative <pantyhose> 369 times). I would like to thank one anonymous reviewer for bringing these cases to my attention.

  9. Of all 12,772 monomorphemic words in CELEX, only 170 exhibit three or more subsequent vowel letters. Of these, 27 contain the grapheme <qu> plus two vowel letters; here <u> clearly serves a special function. 111 words end in the pattern vowel + <ous> > (e.g. <arduous>, <curious>, <vitreous>). Of the remaining 33 (one word contains both <qu> and ends in <ous>) words, <eau> is the most frequent pattern (7x).

  10. There are some very interesting patterns, however, which would make a separate analysis potentially fruitful. For example, derivations with -er differ with regard to <y>-alternation depending on the animacy of the signified. Simplifying only marginally, derived words denoting animate entities tend to replace stem-final <y>, while words denoting inanimate objects tend to retain <y>. A striking example is the pair <flier>/<flyer>, the first one denoting a flying person, the latter one a leaflet.

  11. For systematic exceptions see Carney (1994: 130f.).

  12. For example, a search for <moveable> in CoCA (all sections except spoken) yields 182 results, <movable> on the other hand yields 570 results.

  13. Apart from <ve>, one could also investigate graphemic alternations involving <ge> (and potentially <ce>), as one anonymous reviewer rightly points out (<fledgling> vs. <fledgeling>).

  14. The category of the base word, which is usually given in similar compilations, is not relevant for the present investigation and is accordingly left out in Table 1. Homonymous suffixes like -ful (A) and -ful (N) are collapsed in one entry in Table 1 for the sake of brevity.

  15. Three suffixes have been excluded for the analysis of <e>-deletion, -(e)ry, nominal -y, and -ee. The form of -(e)ry is ambiguous (ery/ry), and thus a present or absent <e> after <v> cannot unequivocally be attributed to the base, because it may be part of the suffix (<slavery>, for example, could either be analysed as <slave + ry> or as <slav + ery>).

    Likewise, for nominal -y, there is a competing suffix -ey which makes a clear distinction of base and suffix very hard: <lovey> could be analysed as <love + y> or as <lov + ey>.

    Finally, -ee had to be excluded because there is a strong bias in the English writing system against three adjacent vowel letters (cf. Fn. 9), even more so three similar vowel letters. Thus, even though a form like <shavee> is actually attested, it cannot count as an instance of <e>-deletion because there is no possible opposition: a form like <shaveee> cannot be expected for graphotactic reasons.

  16. Note that Dalton-Puffer and Plag (2000) classify word formation with -ful (N) as derivation rather than compounding on syntactic grounds.

  17. The fact that -hood with adjectival base tends to replace <y> with <i> is observed by Friederich (1965).

  18. As one anonymous reviewer points out, it is not clear whether the base of contrariwise really is an adjective. It is, however, the only potential adjectival base in the set of seven -wise derivations, the other ones all being unequivocally nominal.

  19. Major American English dictionaries like Merriam-Webster, for example, only cite the form with <y>-replacement, <marrier>.

  20. The most important change concerns the so-called parsing line. While Hay (2001, 2002, 2003) uses the x=y line, Hay and Baayen (2002) propose a line with an intercept of 3.76 and a slope of 0.76 on the basis of psycholinguistic modelling.

  21. The smoother is dispensed with in the bottom panel because it is determined by just two outliers (the two rightmost data points).

  22. I would like to thank one anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

  23. Of course, this line of argument is valid only for derivation. Inflection, where graphemic alternations are obligatory, is all but semantically intransparent. On the other hand, there are not fully transparent compounds (e.g. ladybug), and as all compounds, these are realized without alternation.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor of Morphology for very helpful, constructive comments. I am also indebted to Nanna Fuhrhop and the Graphemic Circle at the University of Oldenburg for comments and suggestions on an earlier version. This paper was supported by the German Science Foundation (DFG) project “Prinzipien der Wortschreibung im Deutschen und Englischen” (‘Principles of word spelling in German and English’).

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Berg, K. Graphemic alternations in English as a reflex of morphological structure. Morphology 23, 387–408 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-013-9229-1

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