End-Weight Manifestations in Greek Binomials
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END-WEIGHT MANIFESTATIONS IN GREEK BINOMIALS By ATHINA KIKIOPOULOU A Thesis submitted to the School of English Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MA in LINGUISTICS Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Nina Topintzi Thessaloniki 17 February 2020 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................... i LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................ ii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................... iv ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................. 1 MAIN PARAMETERS OF END-WEIGHT MANIFESTATIONS ................. 6 2.1 Non-Phonological ........................................................................................ 6 2.2 Phonological Parameters and Partial Evidence from Greek .................. 7 2.2.1 Vowels ................................................................................................... 8 2.2.2 Syllable Count .................................................................................... 12 2.2.3 Codas ................................................................................................... 14 2.3 The stress weight-interface and Prosodic End Weight (Ryan, 2019) ... 18 EMPIRICAL STUDY ......................................................................................... 21 3.1 Parameters tested and Expectations........................................................ 21 3.1.1 Vowels ................................................................................................. 22 3.1.2 Syllable Count .................................................................................... 22 3.1.3 Codas ................................................................................................... 22 3.2 General Points in Methodology ............................................................... 23 3.3 First experiment ........................................................................................ 24 3.3.1 Item Selection ..................................................................................... 24 3.3.2 Stimuli ................................................................................................. 25 3.3.3 Results and Discussion ....................................................................... 26 3.4 Second experiment .................................................................................... 31 3.4.1 Nonce word construction ................................................................... 31 3.4.2 Stimuli ................................................................................................. 32 3.4.3 Results and Discussion ....................................................................... 33 3.5 Summary of Results .................................................................................. 36 GENERAL DISCUSSION ................................................................................. 39 4.1 Frequency, Markedness, and Accessibility ............................................. 39 4.2 Phrasal Stress and Weight ....................................................................... 43 4.3 Limitations ................................................................................................. 48 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................... 52 REFERENCES .................................................................................................... 54 APPENDICES ..................................................................................................... 63 LIST OF FIGURES (1) Ryan (2016:6) End Weight Manifestations…………………………….….....1 (2) Anttila (2008:53): Satisfying the Stress-to-Stress Principle…………………19 (3) Ryan (2019:328): Satisfying the Stress-to-Stress Principle …………….…..20 (4) Parker‟s (2002:69) sonority scale for English…………………………….....23 (5) First experiment. Item example: sentence #7, targeting [i] versus [u]………26 (6) Legal word-medial clusters in Greek……………………………………..….30 (7) Second experiment. Item example: sentence #13 targeting [e] and [a]……...33 (8) Violations of lapse……………………………………………………………35 i LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Ablaut patterns in Greek…………………………………………………….…9 Table 2: Relative and F1 and F2 values for the five Greek vowels (Hz).……………...10 Table 3: Relative and Absolute vowel duration for the five Greek vowels (ms)………12 Table 4: Syllable effects: Evidence form Greek………………………………………..13 Table 5: Syllable effects in multinomials: Evidence form Greek…..………………….14 Table 6: Summary of parameters tested………..………………………………………21 Table 7: First experiment: Examples of binomials utilized…………………………….25 Table 8: First experiment: Results per parameter………………………………………27 Table 9: First experiment: Number of times that vowels appear in slot B………..……27 Table 10: First experiment: Wilcoxon‟s results per Final Coda sub-parameter……..…28 Table 11: Friedman‟s test mean values per group………………...……………………29 Table 12: First experiment: Binomial distributions per group…………………...…….29 Table 13: Second experiment: Examples of binomials utilized…………………..……32 Table 14: Second experiment: Results per parameter………………………………….34 Table 15: Second experiment: Number of times that vowels appear in slot B…..…….34 Table 16: Second experiment: Wilcoxon‟s results per Final Coda sub-parameter….....36 Table 17: Summary of Results………...……………………………………………….37 ii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Greek: Standard Modern Greek GG: binomial consisting of two Greek words LL: binomial consisting of two loanwords GL: binomial consisting of a Greek word and a loan word BNC: Brithish National Corpus HNC: Hellenic National Corpus iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my supervisor, dr. Nina Topintzi for being a role model and instilling in me the critical skills required in academic research and linguistic analysis. I am grateful for her constant support and invaluable feedback throughout the whole process. Her guidance and eagerness to assist me with any concern, along with her sheer belief in me has been the greatest motivation in completing this thesis. I am also grateful to dr. Maria Dimitrakopoulou for her valuable comments on the practical aspects of this study, such as stimuli selection and construction, and the collection and statistical analysis of data. I also wish to thank Prof. Katerina Nicolaidis for introducing me to the field of phonology, the practical advice on the construction of the two tasks of this study, and her ever-encouraging words. Finally, I am thankful to my family and friends, who always believe in me. iv ABSTRACT Prosodic End-Weight refers to the tendency of prosodically heavier constituents to occupy a position closer to the end of a sentence, so as to coincide with nuclear stress (Ryan, 2019). Coordination in binomial structures is probably its most well-studied aspect. Maybe the most well-known analysis comes from Cooper and Ross (1975), who suggest that, among other factors, phonological properties that can be associated with the second slot in an irreversible binomial of the type A and B, are lowness and backness in vowels, greater word length (in terms of syllable count), as well as complexity of codas (Oakeshott-Taylor, 1984; Benor and Levy, 2006; Mollin 2012). The current study seeks to investigate the phonological aspects that can potentially determine word order in coordination in Standard Modern Greek under the principle of End-Weight. The language exemplifies certain tendencies that seem to coincide with manifestations related to Prosodic End-Weight. An observed potential effect of vowel quality is illustrated in patterns of ablaut structures like din-dan and platsa-plutsa, and a syllable-count one in fixed expressions like “ήζε θαη έζηκα” [ˈiζi ce ˈeζima] „customs‟ Moreover, a stress-related tendency has been observed in Greek acronyms by Topintzi and Kainada (2012) and Revithiadou et al. (2015), according to which acronyms, the final syllables of which bear codas (especially illegal ones) are more likely to attract stress than open final syllables. The main aim is to experimentally explore the potential effects of vowel quality, syllable count, and final syllable coda status (null and singleton, in stressed and unstressed environments) in the ordering of constituents in Greek. Two forced choice tasks have been designed to test the potential legitimacy of these presumed tendencies, following a methodology similar to Bolinger (1962), Oakeshott-Taylor (1984), and Parker (2003); in both tasks, the participants read a Greek sentence ending in a binomial and are asked to indicate which order of the two constituents they prefer (A and B or B and A). In the first task, the constituent words are not parts of a frozen form, but random pairings. The second task follows the same methodology, but utilizes nonce words, after Pinker and Birdsong (1979), Parker (2003), and Ryan (2019), aiming at completely eliminating any semantic effects, and grasping better phonological control of word structure, through the creation of minimal pairs. The tendencies emerging from the results indicate that there are indeed effects of vowel