earticle

영어

This paper focuses on base truncation in English word formation. Deletion of base final vowel or rime occurs over a morpheme boundary formed by a morpheme concatenation. It is argued in this study that such truncation is attributed to avoid a sequence of vowels over a morpheme boundary, two contiguous syllables with identical onsets, the neutralization of a strong vowel in the ate suffix, and three or more consecutive stressless syllables in the output of word formation. Truncation of base final vowel is based on cross-linguistic tendency, which is reflected in the interaction between specific and general segmental faithfulness constraints. The deletion of base-final rime in three different sub-groups of data is implemented through Contiguity-Base, Id-Str(V), *Clash, and prosodically-related constraints such as Ft-Bin and *Lapse. The constraints and their rankings proposed in this study show effects of vowel-initial suffixes in word formation process in English. Even though structural requirements from diverse vowel-initial suffixes are incongruous, they all demand structural well-formedness in outputs and they are explained by the current analysis.