Monosyllabicity in prosodic morphology: the case of truncated personal names in English

Abstract

English truncated personal names of the monosyllabic type are analyzed in the framework of optimality theory in light of previous work on name truncation in other languages in the research program of prosodic morphology, as the monosyllabicity of English truncated names cannot be explained by the prosodic markedness constraints used in such analyses. A comparison of the structures of English truncated names & monomorphemic English words in the CELEX corpus is argued to show that monosyllabicity is a common, unmarked structure in English for which Birgit Alber's (2001) concept of output-oriented prominence maximization provides a felicitous account that (1) does not require monosyllabicity to be posited as an additional restriction, as claimed by John McCarthy & Alan Prince (1998), & (2) captures numerous phonological processes in English including vowel reduction & diachronic schwa deletion. The treatment of final consonants in English name truncations is explained by the action of two different constraints, a truncation faithfulness constraint & a cluster markedness constraint, respectively yielding consonant finality in 90% of truncations & cluster avoidance in only 50%. 64 References. J. Hitchcock