Phonological and phonetic variability in complex words: an uncharted territory

This paper discusses a long-standing problem in morphology, the relation of form and meaning. It is demonstrated that there is an unexpectedly large amount of phonological and phonetic variation in morphologically complex words. This variation has either been widely neglected in the past, or it has been dealt with in an unsatisfactory manner in terms of general rules and lexicalized exceptions. The paper discusses pertinent examples from English, covering phenomena from derivation, compounding and inflection, looking at morpho-phonological alternations (i.e. stress preservation, stress shift, (de)gemination, resyllabification, compound stress assignment), and at variation in phonetic implementation (i.e. phonetic reduction and the phonetic implementation of homophonous affixes). It is argued that the hitherto neglected phoneticphonological variation presents a big challenge for many current theories of the lexicon, morphological theory, and theories of lexical processing.*

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