A bootstrap-based reanalysis of Zamma (2013)
Shigeto Kawahara
March 2016
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/002926

In his recent book “Patterns and Categories in English Suffixation and Stress Placement: A Theoretical and Quantitative Study,” Zamma (2013) identified four classes of English suffixes in terms of the (i) root attachment behaviors and (ii) stress patterns, instead of the more traditional “Class 1 vs. Class 2” distinction (Siegel, 1974). He showed that these four types of suffixes are not evenly distributed in the English lexicon, and their distributions are affected by whether the suffixes are light or heavy. He went on to argue that with the theory of unranked constraints developed by Anttila (2002), we can predict these distributions. This short paper offers a statistical reassessment of this claim using a bootstrap resampling method.