Stefan Gries , Department of Linguistics, UCSB

The influence of phonology on word coinage, syntactic alternations, and multi-word units

For a long time, linguistics has been a discipline dominated by the proponents of the idea that linguistic knowledge can be divided into several different modules, e.g., a module for syntax, a module for phonology, and a module for semantics. However, there are more and more studies that show that there are a variety of phenomena and effects which are better explained if one does not adopt a modular approach and rather looks at ways in which different kinds of information interact with each other. In this talk, I will discuss ways in which phonological information influences linguistic processes on other levels. More specifically, I will exemplify some partially unexpected ways of how phonological variables influence

- the formation of morphological blends (on the basis of my own corpus of approx. 1700 blends of the motor + hotel -> motel kind);

- the unconscious choices of two functionally nearly equivalent syntactic constructions (on the basis of all verb-particle constructions in the British Component of the International Corpus of English);

- the conventionalization of multi-word units (on the basis of V-NP idioms in the Cobuild Idiom Dictionary and all way-constructions in the British National Corpus).