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

The present study is concerned with the structure of truncated personal names in English. Truncations have received a lot of attention in recent years. Previously judged a highly irregular and idiosyncratic class of word-formation processes, truncatory processes have now become an important test case for the research program of prosodic morphology (McCarthy & Prince 1986, 1993). The structure of truncated names in various languages has been shown to be not idiosyncratic at all; rather, truncated names are exponents of a word-formation process whose output is to a very large extent determined by the phonology and the prosody of the language. The data provided in (1a-c) show examples of name truncations in German, Spanish and French, for which detailed analyses have been proposed within the framework of prosodic morphology (Fery 1997, Ito & Mester 1997, Wiese 2001 for German, Pineros 1998, 1999, 2000 for Spanish, Scullen 1997, Nelson 1998 for French; cf. also Weeda 1992 for a survey of truncatory processes in various languages, Mester 1990, Benua 1995 for Japanese). (1d) illustrates the English process to be studied here.

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