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Highlights • Randomly constructed 1+1 NN compounds receive an overall low score. • Elasticity has a significant effect on acceptability score. • Naturalness and frequency have a significant effect on acceptability score. Abstract Chinese 1+1 NNs refer to compounds made of two monosyllabic nouns, such as shū - bāo 'book-bag' and jī-dàn 'chicken-egg'. They occur frequently, do not violate any prosodic constraint, and appear to be highly productive. However, in Qin and Duanmu (2017) , it was found that the mean acceptability ranking was quite low for randomly constructed 1+1 NNs. Since the focus of Qin and Duanmu (2017) was on a different issue, the set of 1+1 NNs was small and not of balanced design. In this study, we gathered acceptability scores from 17 Chinese native speakers on 1000 randomly constructed 1+1 NNs. It is found that the mean acceptability score is only 22.6%, even lower than that of Qin and Duanmu (2017). In addition, while Qin and Duanmu (2017) found ambiguity, naturalness, and frequency to have significant effects on acceptability scores, the present study did not find ambiguity to be relevant. We also found that 1+1 NNs consisting of two elastic nouns are significantly less acceptable than those consisting of one or two non-elastic nouns, although the effect size is rather small. Possible reasons for the low acceptability of 1+1 NN compounds are discussed, including semantic transparency, grammatical relations between the two nouns of a compound, and modern vs. classic vocabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some seemingly robust linguistic generalizations remain controversial for years, often for lack of experimental verification. As a case study, we examine word length preferences in Chinese NN compounds. Since the original observation of Lü (1963) , there has been a broad consensus that 1+2 (monosyllabic + disyllabic) is ill formed, while 2+1, 2+2 and 1+1 are well-formed. In addition, it has been shown that the preferences can be derived from metrical principles. However, a judgment experiment is yet to be offered to verify the preferences, and without it some scholars remain skeptical. We offer such an experimental study, in which 15 native speakers are asked to rate the acceptability of 1,132 randomly generated NN compounds, with 283 each of the four length patterns. It is found that 2+2 is the most acceptable, followed by 2+1, while 1+2 and 1+1 are the least acceptable. The high rating of 2+2 and the low rating of 1+2 support previous predictions. The rating for 2+1 is slightly lower than expected, and that of 1+1 is most unexpected. It is also found that four other factors (the naturalness of the referent, homograph ambiguity, the boundness of a morpheme, and frequency) have significant effects on acceptability judgment, although their sizes are smaller than that of the length effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Lyman''s Law is a general phonotactic restriction in Japanese which prohibits two voiced obstruents within the same morpheme. This law manifests itself, for example, in the blockage of Rendaku, a phenomenon which voices the initial consonant of the second member of a compound. Lyman''s Law blocks Rendaku when the second member already contains a voiced obstruent. Lyman''s Law has been formulated as a general phonotactic restriction against two voiced obstruents (), and believed to hold only in native words, not in loanwords, because there are many loanwords that violate this restriction (e.g. [gaado] ‘guard’ and [bagu] ‘bug’: ). Building on , and , however, this study shows that Lyman''s Law is active even in loanwords, and nonce words more generally. In Experiments I and II, native speakers of Japanese judged Rendaku in nonce words to be less natural when it resulted in a violation of Lyman''s Law. In Experiment III, native speakers of Japanese judged devoicing of real loanwords and nonce words to be more natural when devoicing was caused by Lyman''s Law. Therefore, the three experiments, as a package, show that Lyman''s Law is active both as a blocker and a trigger of phonological alternations. A general implication of this study is that a restriction with many lexical exceptions can still impact native speakers’ treatment of loanwords and nonce words, as predicted by theories that posit that constraints are violable (). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

0It is one of the most basic generalizations in phonology that only certain sets of sounds pattern together in phonological processes. These sets are referred to as natural classes. This paper develops a new analysis of the natural class generalization, formulated in terms of Optimality Theory. It is shown that natural classes derive from the nature of the set of markedness constraints. For example, sounds can pattern together as a natural class if they violate markedness constraints in the same environment, so given constraints *XA and *XB A and B can form a natural class. As a result the range of possible natural classes depends on the inventory of constraints, not on the feature set. This analysis is shown to have empirical advantages over the standard account according to which natural classes are characterized purely in terms of features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]