Form and meaning in English compounds: the role of prosody

复合词研究中一个长期存在的问题是英语名词-名词复合词中重音的不同位置：“Left Stress”，主要突出在第一个复合成分(修饰语N1)上，或“Right Stress”，主要突出在第二个成分(Head，N2)上。例如，根据英语的参考语法，牛津街和歌剧歌手的左重音，而牛津路和夏装的右重音。不同的作者试图制定规则来解释所描述的模式。然而，最近大量的实证研究表明，复合重音分配不受确定性规则的支配，而是概率地依赖于说话人心理词典中其他复合词的属性分布，其中包括信息性、类比性、语义、词汇化和长度等因素。然而，尽管这一理解得到了加强，但仍然没有解释这些影响是如何从演讲者的经历中出现的。这个项目将通过探索歧视性学习理论在多大程度上可以解释观察到的模式来解决这一差距。我们假设，重音模式是通过形式和意义之间的联系而出现的，这是一个有区别的学习过程。我们将在辨别性词典模型的框架内，通过对大量语音数据的计算建模来检验这一假设。通过测试这样一种普遍的联想机制可以解释明显不同的影响这一假设，该项目将对语言学理论做出重要贡献。

An enduring issue in the study of compound words is the variable placement of stress in English noun-noun compounds: ‘left stress’, with main prominence on the first compound constituent (the modifier, N1), or ‘right stress’, with main prominence on the second constituent (the head, N2). For example, according to reference grammars of English, Oxford Street and opera singer have left stress, while Oxford Road and summer dress have right stress. Various authors have attempted to formulate rules to account for the patterns described. However, a large body of empirical work has more recently shown that compound stress assignment is not governed by deterministic rules but depends probabilistically on the distribution of properties across other compounds in the speaker’s mental lexicon, with factors such as informativeness, analogy, semantics, lexicalization and length playing a role. Yet despite this enhanced understanding, there is still no account that explains how these effects emerge from a speaker’s experience. This project will address this gap by exploring to what extent the theory of discriminative learning can explain the patterns observed. We hypothesize that stress patterns emerge through an association between form and meaning in a process of discriminative learning. We will test this hypothesis using computational modeling of large amounts of speech data within the framework of the Discriminative Lexicon Model. By testing the hypothesis that such a general mechanism of association can account for apparently disparate effects, the project will make an important contribution to linguistic theory.