16.1515, Review: Mophology/Phonetics: Hay (2003)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-1515. Thu May 12 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.1515, Review: Mophology/Phonetics: Hay (2003)

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1)
Date: 11-May-2005
From: Kevin Mendousse < k.mendousse at auckland.ac.nz >
Subject: Causes and Consequences of Word Structure 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 12:25:59
From: Kevin Mendousse < k.mendousse at auckland.ac.nz >
Subject: Causes and Consequences of Word Structure 
 

AUTHOR: Hay, Jennifer
TITLE: Causes and Consequences of Word Structure
SERIES: Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Routledge
YEAR: 2003
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-1108.html


Dr Kevin Mendousse
The University of Auckland, NZ and Université de Paris-Sorbonne (FDC), FR 

SYNOPSIS

As acknowledged in the author's preface, CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF WORD 
STRUCTURE originated as a PhD dissertation. As such, its purpose is to 
make a scholarly, scientific contribution to its field of inquiry and it 
is therefore primarily intended for the initiated linguist rather than for 
the novice reader.

Within a few paragraphs of Hay's opening statement that her book is "a 
book about morphology" (p. 3), the problematic is set within the 
theoretical framework of morphological decomposition and invokes the 
pressing need to uncover the factors determining the likelihood that a 
morphologically complex form will be decomposed during access, some forms 
being inherently more decomposable than others. While linguistic 
morphology has traditionally tended to focus on affixes and on accounting 
for (un)expected (dis)similarities in their behaviour, the author argues 
here for a different level of morphological abstraction following on from 
her experimental findings, which strongly suggest that predictions about 
the behaviour of specific affixes are best made when the focus is on the 
behaviour of individual words rather than on that of individual affixes.

Recognising that the recognition of words in processing a speech signal is 
a prerequisite to the listener's higher task of reconstructing the 
originally intended message, CHAPTER 1 "Introduction" (pp. 3-20) goes on 
to review major models of speech perception and morphological processing, 
along with various lexical and prelexical effects triggered by such 
factors as phonological transparency, temporality and relative frequency 
(lexical effects), metrical structure, possible word constraint and 
probabilistic phonotactics (prelexical effects). It further analyses the 
consequences of such effects for both words and affixes, and provides 
several clarifying disclaimers, including its acknowledgement that all 
experiments and claims put forward are strictly limited to the 
derivational morphology of English. The chapter concludes with a brief 
outline of the remainder of the book.

CHAPTER 2 "Phonotactics and Morphology in Speech Perception" (pp. 21-37) 
moves on to demonstrate that the use of phonotactics by English speakers 
for speech segmentation purposes has direct bearing on morphological 
processing. The discussion is initiated with a brief review of the growing 
body of evidence for the role of phonotactic patterns in speech 
perception, including data from neural network models. The author then 
offers a close examination of the results obtained from two experiments: 
experiment 1 was designed to implement a simple recurrent network, 
initially trained with monomorphemic words to use phonotactics for 
spotting word boundaries and then tested on a corpus of multimorphemic 
words; experiment 2 seeks to investigate the degree to which subjects 
exploit phonotactic probabilities in the morphological parsing of nonsense 
words. 

Following up on these results, which indicate that the learning of word 
segmentation on the basis of phonotactics is likely to affect 
morphological decomposition and that phonotactic patterns can be used 
online for the decomposition of nonsense words into morphemes, CHAPTER 
3 "Phonotactics and the Lexicon" (pp. 39-70) evaluates the consequences of 
this for the processing and the representation of real words. The author 
reports on the findings of a third experiment in which subjects displayed 
significant preference for words with low probability junctural 
phonotactics when asked to make intuitive judgements about the 
morphological complexity of real words. She goes on to present evidence 
demonstrating the long-term effects of this within the lexicon, namely 
that prefixed words that do not contain phonotactic information signalling 
a boundary are prone to a reduced perception of "prefixedness", a loss of 
semantic transparency, a proliferation of meaning and an overtaking of 
their base's lexical frequency. No such effects were however found by the 
author in the case of suffixes, a predictable fact apparently due to the 
left-to-right nature of lexical access. 

In CHAPTER 4 "Relative Frequency and Morphological Decomposition" (pp. 71-
95), Hay moves away from prelexical to lexical processing in order to 
explore the role of lexical frequency, arguing that the more relevant 
frequency effect on morphological decomposition is one of relative 
frequency between the derived form and its base rather than one of 
absolute frequency of the derived form as traditionally held by models of 
morphological access and productivity. The chapter outlines the general 
assumptions found in the literature about the role of surface frequency, 
along with some results relating to the role of the frequency of the base. 
The author then turns to topical models of morphological access, showing 
that, where such models predict a role of lexical frequency with regard to 
decomposition, it is one of relative lexical frequency. Finally, she 
describes two experiments that attest to the fact that maximally 
decomposable forms are those which are much less frequent than their 
parts, and conversely: experiment 4 shows that subjects are more likely to 
rate forms with higher frequency bases as more complex than matched 
counterparts with relatively lower frequency ones; experiment 5 reveals 
that prefixed forms with high frequency bases are more likely to attract a 
pitch accent to the prefix.

CHAPTER 5 "Relative Frequency and the Lexicon" (pp. 97-122) turns to a 
synchronic examination of the English lexicon to establish the claim that 
if mechanisms of speech perception and production tend to make complex 
words more robustly decomposed than others, then evidence of this should 
be readily available in the lexicon. The author begins with a discussion 
of the overall frequency distributions of both prefixed and suffixed forms 
before experimentally investigating the role of frequency in such forms. 
Results based on the numbers and types of definitions appearing in 
Webster's 1913 Unabridged Dictionary suggest that relative frequency does 
indeed affect semantic transparency as well as polysemy, since derived 
forms that are more frequent than their bases have a tendency to drift 
away from the meaning of their bases as well as to proliferate in meaning. 
Polysemy is also shown to be related to absolute frequency, with higher 
frequency derived forms being less semantically transparent than lower 
frequency ones. A discussion of some methodological consequences of these 
results for current experimental work on morphological access concludes 
the chapter.

CHAPTER 6 "Relative Frequency and Phonetic Implementation" (pp. 123-137) 
draws on chapter 3's calculations over lexica and its speculation that 
many phonological violations across suffixal boundaries may, in fact, be 
resolved in the phonetic implementation because phoneme transitions across 
suffix boundaries are more likely to be more malleable than those toward 
the beginning of the word, which are more vital to word recognition. It 
describes an experiment designed to test the effect of the decomposability 
of suffixed words upon phonetic implementation. More specifically, the 
author investigates the implementation of /t/ when it occurs in a 
consonant cluster that straddles a morpheme boundary. The relative 
frequency of the derived form and base is found to be relevant to 
morphological decomposition, as is the strength of a morpheme boundary to 
the phonetics. 

CHAPTER 7 "Morphological Productivity" (pp. 139-152) extends the study to 
include a discussion of morphological productivity. It provides a brief 
account of the most widely used metric P (which measures the category-
conditioned degree of productivity) for quantifying morphological 
productivity, along with some of its reported advantages and shortcomings. 
It also illustrates ways in which morphological productivity has been 
modelled in the past. Distinguishing between the proponents of the scalar 
view and those of the absolute view, the author then goes on to examine 
the relationship of phonotactics and relative lexical frequency to 
morphological productivity by drawing on frequency counts taken from the 
CELEX lexical database (which includes counts from the COBUILD corpus) for 
forms that have productive affixes and monomorphemic bases. Arguing that 
productivity is a continuum that arises as a function of decomposed words 
in the lexicon, the author finally settles for the scalar view of 
productivity: the more an affix is represented by highly decomposable 
forms, the more likely it is to be productive. 

CHAPTER 8 "Affix Ordering" (pp. 153-184) engages with the hotly debated 
problem of stacking restrictions amongst the derivational affixes of 
English where only a very small proportion of the numerous combinations is 
actually realised. Early attempts to account for apparent restrictions on 
affix ordering have often invoked some form of the Affix-Ordering 
Generalisation, which divides affixes into two levels L1 and L2, with L1 
affixation occurring prior to L2 so that no L1 affix can attach outside L2 
affixes. The stated problem is that such accounts of affix ordering are 
overly restrictive and draw the line at the wrong level of abstraction, 
while more recent work, which has dismissed altogether the idea of 
ordering restrictions (beyond selectional restrictions), misses a number 
of important generalisations. The claim put forward here is that both the 
range of generalisations about English stacking restrictions, along with 
their large body of systematic word-based exceptions, are best captured in 
terms of parsability. Taking the reader through a series of hypotheses, a 
critical discussion of affix classes, a case study of the denominal 
suffix   -al and two experiments designed to test subjects' intuitions 
about the likelihood of -al suffixation to a range of -ment final forms to 
ascertain whether their preferences about non-words reflect the 
decomposability of the base, Hay explores the idea that affix-ordering 
constraints are related to the perception and storage of morphologically 
complex forms. She demonstrates that her maxim "an affix which can be 
easily parsed out should not occur inside an affix which can not [sic]" 
(p. 184), when combined with an understanding of the role of frequency in 
morphological decomposition, provides a better account of affix-ordering 
restrictions in English. The discussion finally extends to prefixes which, 
although less likely to co-occur, are involved in bracketing paradoxes 
contended to be cases in which a highly parsable prefix appears to have 
attached before a marginally parsable suffix. 

The book, which set out to explore possible effects of speech perception 
strategies on morphological structure, comes to an end in CHAPTER 
9 "Conclusion" (pp. 185-189), where the main findings are succinctly 
summarised. These include the role and use of probabilistic phonotactics 
for word segmentation, the relevance to and phonetic consequences of 
relative lexical frequency on morphological decomposition, the 
relationship underlying decomposability and morphological productivity, 
and finally the intricate link between affix ordering and decomposability.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

Overall, Hay's text is equally informed and informative, and provides the 
reader with a truly insightful account of morphological decomposition and 
of how fundamentals of speech processing are responsible for determining 
the likelihood that a morphologically complex form will be decomposed 
during access. The originality of this contribution to linguistic 
morphology lies in its problematic which, because it brings together 
questions that are usually considered well outside the field of morphology 
(How do listeners process an incoming speech signal? How do infants learn 
to spot boundaries between words and begin to build a lexicon?), sheds new 
light on the kind of abstraction needed.

The proposed level of abstraction enables significant progress to be made 
on linguistic questions that have not generally been studied together. In 
particular, Hay's investigation of the causes and consequences of word 
structure demonstrates that a better understanding of morphological 
decomposability yields tremendous explanatory power, from fine phonetic 
details through to predicting how affixes can be used when neologizing and 
how they may co-occur. Importantly, her research shows that a thorough 
understanding of these phenomena requires a sophisticated knowledge of the 
morphological behaviour of individual words rather than of individual 
suffixes.

Hay's findings provide elements of answers to two problems recently 
regarded by Aitchison (2003) as central to the psychology of language and 
to the understanding of how humans cope with words. First (p. 127), is the 
mental lexicon one of words stored as single items ready for retrieval or 
is it one of disassembled morphemes pieced back together when needed? 
Second (p. 151), how and why does the meaning of words change?

The strongest point in this excellent piece of scientific research is 
undoubtedly the author's outstanding ability to draw on the previous 
literature to put forward innovative hypotheses, and to then test such 
hypotheses herself through the careful and creative design of experiments. 
The descriptions and explanations are always to the point and self-
contained, the writing clear and effective, despite the presence of 
numerous typographical mistakes and occasional grammatical errors. 

Evidently, the author has an exceptional ability to communicate sometimes 
difficult concepts in terms that "speak" to the reader, while encouraging 
reflection through a discussion that is interesting, relevant and often 
thought-provoking. This, combined with repeated reader-friendly summaries, 
theoretically well-grounded hypotheses and claims consistently backed up 
with statistical evidence, provides the key to the text's extraordinary 
lucidity. 

An added advantage lies in the fact that, because the book does not assume 
the reader has any prior knowledge of statistics, it is relatively free of 
mathematical jargon. The author's scholarship is thus readily available to 
the intended readership as well as to the linguistic community at large. 
The drawback, however, is that this lack of a description of the 
mathematical apparatus would make it difficult for the reader ill-versed 
in parametric and non-parametric measures of evaluation to gauge 
effectively the significance of the findings or to follow up actively on 
the research.

As per the disclaimer in chapter 1, the book argues that speech 
segmentation strategies used by English speakers exert influence on 
English morphology but it does not examine the consequences of this claim 
for other languages. A crosslinguistic study to include data from other 
natural languages would therefore be a very interesting investigation to 
pursue in order to ascertain the language-specific or universal bearings 
of Hay's findings.

REFERENCE

Aitchison, J. (2003), Words in the Mind - An Introduction to the Mental 
Lexicon. Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. First published 1987. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr Kevin Mendousse is a lecturer in French at the University of Auckland 
(NZ) and holds a PhD in linguistics from the Université de Paris-Sorbonne 
(FR), where he taught English phonetics and phonology as well as grammar 
and translation. He is a member of that university's linguistics research 
laboratory Formes-Discours-Cognition (FDC), which has accreditation from 
the French Ministry of Education and Research. His current research 
interests include phonetics, (morpho)phonology, and, more generally, 
psycholinguistics.





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