Quantitative analysis of English hypocoristics: wellformedness and phonological complexity

Quantitative analysis of English hypocoristics: wellformedness and phonological complexity

  This paper concerns computing wellformedness in phonology. The recent proposals based on Information Theory, Goldsmith (2002, 2006) in particular, suggest that the wellformedness of a word can be computed in terms of Phonological Complexity (PC), which is calculated from the probabilities of unigrams or bigrams that comprise the word. Goldsmith further maintains that the PC values of wellformed words are lower than that of illformed words. The goal of this paper is to examine whether this proposal is successfully borne out by English hypocoristic formation. For this purpose, we obtain unigram and bigram probabilities from the CELEX lexical database (Baayen et al. 1995), based on which the PC of 140 cases of English hypocoristic words are computed. The statistical analysis of the base words and the hypocoristic forms shows that the mean PC value of the former is ‘significantly’ higher than that of the latter, confirming the validity of the proposals based on Information Theory.