The Predictability of Name Truncation: Factoring in Language Change
Abstract
Truncation of proper names (e.g. English Robert > Rob) has been claimed to be a marginal or extragrammatical word-formation process due to the presumed unpredictability and irregularity of its outputs (Dressler & Merlini-Barbaresi 1994 et seq.). In this study, the hypothesis is pursued that the coexistence of multiple truncation patterns in a single language is in some cases due to language change: older patterns coexist with more recent ones, thus creating the false impression of random variability. This hypothesis is tested in an experiment where participants are asked to choose the most appropriate short name for a person of a certain age group in a dialogue. The experiment was conducted over the crowdsourcing platform AlpiLinK (https://alpilink.it/) for speakers of Romance and Germanic varieties of Northern Italy. The results of the experiment show that the truncation patterns tested for Italian and German names differ significantly in the age that participants associate with them. A second finding of this study is that diachronically close truncation patterns differ minimally in the grammars that correspond to each pattern in a formal model of truncation implemented as a typological system in Optimality Theory (Alber & Arndt-Lappe 2022). Minimal grammatical change defined inside the typological system has been hypothesized to be a characteristic feature of language change (Alber & Meneguzzo 2016; Alber & Kokkelmans 2022; Apostolopoulou 2022), a hypothesis confirmed by the results of the experiment in this study. Name truncation therefore is characterized by structured, rather than random variability: truncation patterns can be ordered by age and conform to an expected path of (minimal) diachronic change.
Keywords
prosodic morphology, name truncation, language change, Optimality Theory, crowdsourcing, predictability, Property Theory, questionnaire studyReferences
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NextGenerationEU
Grant numbers Missione 4 Componente 2, Investimento 1.5 D.D. 1058 23/06/2022, ECS_00000043
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