Stress in the Family: Reconsidering Stress Preservation in English -ory Adjectives
Creators: name: Arndt-Lappe, Sabine
name: Ben Hedia, Sonia
Publisher: name: PsychArchives
Year: 2019
Subjects: subject: linguistics
subject: word stress
subject: morpho-phonology
subject: paradigms
subject: 150

description: Descriptions of English morphophonology traditionally make a distinction between stress-preserving and stress-shifting affixes. Stress in words with stress-shifting affixes is often assumed to be an effect of stress rules. Words with stress-preserving suffixes, by contrast, preserve the stress of their bases. In most accounts the notion of 'stress preservation' relies on two basic theoretical assumptions about the nature of phonology-morphology interaction: One is that there is a clear base from which stress can be preserved. The other is that stress is computed online, i.e. is not stored. Both assumptions are contested in the literature, in particular by accounts that assume that morphophonology is also influenced by paradigmatic relations in the lexicon (e.g. Collie 2008, Stanton &amp; Steriade 2014). The present paper is concerned with adjectives affixed with ory, a suffix that has been notoriously problematic for both the dichotomy of stress-preserving and stress-shifting suffixes, and for the idea that morphological categories are specified for their bases (e.g. Liberman &amp; Prince 1977, Trevian 2007, Zamma 2012, Bauer et al. 2013: 288ff.). Specifically, we concentrate on adjectives ending in (at)ory in British English, exemplified in (1). (1) a. óscillatory, oscíllatory, oscillátory b. artículatory, articulátory c. explánatory, explanátory Stress is highly variable. Also, the morphological structure of ory derivatives is debated. Most accounts assume that ory is deverbal. This would make óscillate, artículate and expláin the base verbs for the examples in (1), and óscillatory, artículatory and explánatory the stress-preserving forms. Note, however, that all ory words exemplified in (1) are also related to existing nouns ending in (at)ion: oscillátion, articulátion, explanátion. (at)ion nouns are traditionally not assumed to be bases of -ory derivatives, but have the same stress as some of the variants in (1). We present the results of a reading study in which 31 native speakers of British English read 32 (at)ory derivatives in naturalistic sentence contexts (N = 1.289). The test words allowed us to systematically test for stress preservation from related verbs and nouns. Statistical analysis of the data (logistic regression, conditional inference trees) reveals that stress assignment is higly systematic, confirming our findings from previous empirical work (Arndt-Lappe &amp; Sanz 2017). Contrary to what is claimed in much of the literature, stress in (at)ory derivatives is overwhelmingly stress-preserving, not stress-shifting. However, we find that both, related verbs and nouns, influence stress assignment, as there is a robust frequency effect of both types of related words: Frequency of the verb is predictive of stress preservation from the verb, frequency of the noun is predictive of stress preservation from the noun. Furthermore, instances of 'stress shift', with neither verbal nor nominal stress, are found to occur mainly in (a) cases in which there is another related word with that stress pattern, and (b) cases in which the (at)ory derivative is highly frequent (indicating lexicalised stress). On a theoretical level, our findings present evidence against any approach which relies on strict specifications of base-derivative relationships. We will discuss the implications of our findings for both schema-based and analogy-based theories.