Iggy Roca

The Development of Regular and Irregular Verb Inflection in Spanish Child Language.

We present morphological analyses of verb inflections produced by 15 Spanish-speaking children (age range: 1;7 to 4;7) taken from longitudinal and cross-sectional samples of spontaneous speech and narratives. Our main observation is the existence of a dissociation between regular and irregular processes in the distribution of errors: regular suffixes and unmarked (non-alternating) stems are over-extended to irregulars in childrens inflection errors, but not vice versa. We also found that overregularization errors at all ages are only a small minority of the childrens irregular verbs, that the period of overregularization is preceded by a stage without errors, and that the onset of over-regularizations is connected to the emergence of obligatory finiteness markings. These findings are explained in terms of the dual-mechanism model of inflection.

Saturation of parameter settings in Spanish stress

This paper advances a novel analysis of Spanish non-verb stress couched in the metrical model of Halle & Idsardi (1995), minimally augmented with an Edge Marking domain parameter. All relevant data are surveyed, and the patterns are classified on empirical grounds into unmarked, marked and supermarked. The unmarked pattern, assigned by default, has the stem-final syllable stressed, while the marked pattern involves a binary trochee, also on the right edge of the stem, and supermarked stress a non-final binary trochee or a word Edge Marking domain. All and only these patterns are generated, in both singulars and plurals, through permutations in the settings of three of the four Edge Marking components (domain included), checked by an avoidance constraint barring stress from the desinence. The ‘three-syllable window’ directly falls out from this machinery, both in the established Spanish vocabulary and in incoming borrowings, blind mimicry of the source form thus being obviated, indeed contradicted.

Diachrony and Synchrony in Word Stress.

In Roca (I988) I take to task Harris (I983) and Den Os & Kager (I986) and propose a novel approach to Spanish (nonverbal) word stress according to which (i) the algorithm is not quantity sensitive and thus differs from that of Latin, the parent language, (ii) the system does not obey the Uniformity of Algorithm Principle,2 (iii) the algorithm operates on the morphological stem, rather than on the whole word. As regards (i), I made the suggestion (418, ibid.) that the preferred paroxytone stress in native forms with penultimate closed syllables must be formalized as a lexical prohibition on extrametricality markings in the given environments. Clearly, the formalization of this proposal and the exploration of its consequences are central to the analysis. Moreover, while the arguments for a relaxation of the Uniformity of Algorithm Principle still stand, departures from the principle are doubtless costly and therefore best avoided. Finally, in Roca (I988) there is no discussion of the consequences of (iii) above for the cyclic data presented in Harris (I983), the compatibility of which with (iii) is consequently unclear. All these facts warrant a re-examination of the issue, which I propose to carry out in the present paper. The interest of Spanish word stress is independently motivated on at least the following grounds: (i) it has been the object of considerable study (cf. among others, Harris,

On the sources of word prosody

In SPE (Chomsky & Halle 1968), stress was formalised as a distinctive feature, on a par with [consonantal], [continuant] and so on. Serious problems with this approach were pinpointed in Liberman & Prince (1977). Building on Liberman (1975), these authors conceived of stress as the product of a syllable-grounded network of hierarchical relations. In particular, they argued that, in any given domain (say, a word), syllables are prosodically organised into layers of binary constituents, each constituent made up of a strong element, construable as the ‘head’, and its weak sister. A path linking heads uninterruptedly leads from the tree root to the most salient, and thus primary stressed, syllable of the domain, which they named the ‘designated terminal element’.