A Level Playing-Field: Perceptibility and Inflection in English Compounds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract To explain why English compounds generally avoid internal inflectional suffixation (e.g., key-chain rather than keys-chain ), linguists have often invoked the Level Ordering Hypothesis, that is, that particular types of morphology, in this case inflectional suffixation, are derivationally ordered after compounding. However, a broad range of counter-examples and conceptual objections to Level Ordering have emerged. We propose an alternative account, based on the observation that certain English inflectional suffixes are more perceptible than others ( -ing > -s > -ed ), and that these suffixes are less crucial to lexical access and recovery of meaning than corresponding root-final segments. This proposal was tested in perception and production experiments. In the perception experiment, compounds with a nonsense word as modifier (e.g., dacks van, dacked van ) were auditorily presented to native English speakers, who were asked to spell what they heard. The participants omitted significantly more -ed than -s or -ing . In the production experiment, native English speakers read these compounds. The speakers dropped significantly more -ed than -s or -ing . Furthermore, they dropped more of these sounds when they were spelled as affixes than as part of the root (e.g., dacked van vs. dact van ). These results suggest that English speakers’ avoidance or inclusion of inflection in compounds is based not on Level Ordering but on perceptibility, as well as the status of the consonant as an affix. We further present a formal analysis capturing these factors in terms of Steriade’s Licensing-by-Cue proposal.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".