Phonological biases in grammatical category shifts

Abstract

English disyllabic nouns and verbs differ in stress, with nouns showing stress primarily on the first syllable (trochaic pattern) and verbs showing stress on the second syllable (iambic pattern). This paper explores whether speakers have abstracted this pattern, and whether such knowledge affects a creative use of language: Shifting a word into a new grammatical category. The first of three experiments showed that speakers are more likely to use a novel disyllabic word as a noun in a sentence if it has a trochaic rather than an iambic pattern. Studies two and three found that speakers are more likely to use an established noun as a verb if it has an iambic rather than trochaic stress pattern. However, shifts from verb to noun were more common for trochaic patterns. These results agree with historical data on grammatical category shifts, and show that words from one category will be assimilated to another to the extent that they share phonological features typical of the second category. These phonological effects supplement accounts of grammatical category shifts that are based on semantic/pragmatic factors.

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