Mincing words: Balancing recovery and deletion in word truncation

Abstract

Brazilian Portuguese exhibits word truncation: e.g., the word cruzeiro ‘cruise’ results in the truncated form cruza, where the vowel -a is added to the truncated stem cruz-. Gonçalves (2011) claims that truncated words preserve the onset of the rightmost syllable of the first binary foot. We argue from a corpus-based perspective instead that the truncated stem is better predicted by optimizing two opposing forces: original word recovery and phonological deletion. These are formalized and implemented as right-complete counts (RC) and left-complete counts (LC), based primarily on the analysis of blends and subtractive word formation in Gries (2006) and taking into consideration the informativity of the deleted material as well as the preserved material. Specifically, a model incorporating both RC and LC outperforms one that uses only one or the other, as well as prosodic models based on binary feet, in predicting truncated stems in Brazilian Portuguese. Beyond truncation, our model has implications for morpheme segmentation as well as the mechanics of morphological reanalysis.