Emergent Faithfulness to Proper Nouns in Novel English Blends

Emergent effects (McCarthy & Prince 1994) are the result of phonological constraints or rankings that only reveal themselves in a specific context. That is, they have no discernable effect in the regular phonology of a language but become apparent when speakers perform particular tasks. Crucially, they reveal knowledge that was not learned directly from ambient language data. Emergent effects have been found in second language and interlanguage studies (e.g., Broselow, Chen, & Wang 1998; Zhang 2013; Jesney 2014), lab production and perception experiments (Davidson 2001; Berent et al. 2007; but cf. Davidson 2010), and language games (Moreton, Feng, & Smith 2008). Recent studies have shown that lexical blends can be used as an environment in which emergent effects arise (Shaw 2013; Shaw et al. 2014; Moreton et al. in preparation). Lexical blends are intentional combinations of words that involve truncation and/or overlap (e.g. spork from spoon and fork). The loss of material from blends makes them useful for testing emergent faithfulness effects. In the case of novel blends, speakers can be forced into choosing between blends that preserve more input from one of the source words. Building on the results of Shaw (2013, Shaw et al. 2014), this study uses lexical blends to demonstrate emergent effects of faithfulness constraints indexed to the category proper nouns. Our results from two experiments with English speakers not only suggest that proper nouns are a category that is relevant to the phonological grammar, but also that proper noun faithfulness constraints are universally available. <-will be white for final version 2. Proper noun faithfulness and lexical blends