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Defined By Prosodic And Morphological Properties

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I am fully invested in these critical advances in memetic linguistics research:

[…] In this paper, we go beyond the aforementioned prosodic restrictions on novel morphology, and discuss gradient segmental preferences. We use morphological compounding to probe English speakers’ intuitions about the phonological goodness of long-distance vowel and consonant identity, or complete harmony. While compounding is a central mechanism for word-building in English, its phonology does not impose categorical vowel or consonant agreement patterns, even though such patterns are attested cross-linguistically. The compound type under investigation is a class of insult we refer to as shitgibbons, taking their name from the most prominent such insult which recently appeared in popular online media (§2). We report the results of three online surveys in which speakers rated novel shitgibbons, which did or did not instantiate long-distance harmonies (§3). With the ratings data established, we follow two lines of inquiry to consider their source: first, we compare shitgibbon harmony preferences with the frequency of segmental harmony in English compounds more generally, and conclude that the lexicon displays both vowel and consonant harmony (§4); second, we attribute the lack of productive consonant harmony in shitgibbons to the attested cross-linguistic harmonies, which we implement as a locality bias in MaxEnt grammar (§5).

You had me at “diddly-infixation”.


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