The Prosody and Quantity of English Compounds

The Prosody and Quantity of English Compounds

Rakić, Stanimir

Following the earlier works of Booij (1985) and Nespor & Vogel (1986) I provide further evidence that English compounds are made up of prosodic words. The length of the first components must be preserved because they are identical to basic lexical forms. In some other languages, as for example in Serbian, the length of the first components may be shortened because the inclusion of linking vowels can contribute to the building of the required ‘derived environment’ (Kiparsky 1985). This invoking of the strict cyclicity condition is however necessary only for those English dialects in which the accented syllables are not necessarily closed. In this paper I discuss the prosodic status and quantity of English compounds. Keywords: English Compounds, prosodic structure, trochaic shortening, quantity, stric cyclicity

Article
PeerReviewed

International Burch University

2015

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