Vowel but not consonant identity and the very informal English lexicon

Anne-Michelle Tessier,Michael Becker

doi:10.3765/amp.v5i0.4248

Abstract

This paper studies the phonological properties of shitgibbons, a class of insulting English compounds made up of a monosyllabic obscenity followed by a trochaic innocuous noun. Our experimental data shows that in addition to these categorical prosodic requirements, there are gradient segmental requirements: native speakers judge shitgibbons as more wellformed when their two stressed vowels are identical (e.g. shit-whistle is better than fuck-whistle), but matching word-initial consonants do not improve wellformedness. A corpus study of English compounds shows that both vowel identity and initial consonant identity are overrepresented in the lexicon. Our explanation for the mismatch between the lexicon and the experiment relies on a typological asymmetry: vowels interact across intervening consonants in many languages, but consonants do not selectively interact across other intervening consonants in this way, e.g. the two matching [f]’s in fuck-frisbee cannot be compelled to match while ignoring the intervening coda [k]. The analysis is implemented as a MaxEnt grammar, with a locality bias that prevents assigning weight to the constraint that demands initial consonant matching.

Highlights

In this paper, we go beyond the aforementioned prosodic restrictions on novel morphology, and discuss gradient segmental preferences
With the ratings data established, we follow two lines of inquiry to consider their source: first, we compare shitgibbon harmony preferences with the frequency of segmental harmony in English compounds more generally, and conclude that the lexicon displays both vowel and consonant harmony (§4); second, we attribute the lack of productive consonant harmony in shitgibbons to the attested cross-linguistic harmonies, which we implement as a locality bias in MaxEnt grammar (§5)
We have shown that when given novel shitgibbons, English speakers judge them as more “satisfying” and “funny” when the two stressed vowels are identical, but matching word-initial consonants do not boost judgements

Summary

Introduction

We go beyond the aforementioned prosodic restrictions on novel morphology, and discuss gradient segmental preferences. We use morphological compounding to probe English speakers’ intuitions about the phonological goodness of long-distance vowel and consonant identity, or complete harmony. With the ratings data established, we follow two lines of inquiry to consider their source: first, we compare shitgibbon harmony preferences with the frequency of segmental harmony in English compounds more generally, and conclude that the lexicon displays both vowel and consonant harmony (§4); second, we attribute the lack of productive consonant harmony in shitgibbons to the attested cross-linguistic harmonies, which we implement as a locality bias in MaxEnt grammar (§5). The semantic contribution of the second word is somewhat murky to us — the best examples seem to use nouns that are familiar, concrete, possibly whimsical, and/or humble (food products, household tools and animal names are especially good options.) The recent rise of the shitgibbon at least in North America was spurred by the following two social media posts, both responses to statements by Donald Trump:. (1) Tweet from @metalollie, June 24, 2016: “Scotland voted to stay & plan on a second referendum, you tiny fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret wearing shitgibbon”

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion