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This paper discusses reduplication as a technique of word formation in German. In contrast to previous approaches, which consider reduplication as extra-grammatical and unproductive, this study identifies rhyme and ablaut reduplication as truly reduplicative processes in the morphology of German. A sizeable corpus of these reduplications and an acceptability rating study attest the productivity of this phenomenon. Other contemplable cases of reduplicative structures are properly treated as either phonological doubling, lexical sequencing, or (special cases of) compounding. An analysis in terms of Optimality Theory (OT) is offered which suggests that both rhyme and ablaut reduplication emerge when a segmentally and prosodically underspecified expressive morpheme is attached to a base – given that the base strictly obeys certain word prosodic requirements. The present approach considers the morphophonology to be blind to morphosyntactic structure and consequently eschews constraints that make explicit reference to base-reduplicant correspondence. The OT grammar successfully models the emergence of the fixed bipedal structure, the obligatory segmental deviance of the reduplicant, non-exponence of the expressive morpheme in the case of non-trochaic bases, the variable linearization of base and reduplicant in ablaut reduplication, and the interaction of reduplication with segmental alternations. Certain (crosslinguistic) correlations regarding constraints on reduplicative word formation and poetic devices, such as rhyme and meter, are discussed.

Various recent studies attest that reading involves creating an implicit prosodic representation of the written text which may systematically affect the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in sentence comprehension. Research up to now suggests that implicit prosody itself depends on a partial syntactic analysis of the text, raising the question of whether implicit prosody contributes to the parsing process, or whether it merely interprets the syntactic analysis. The present reading experiments examine the influence of stress-based linguistic rhythm on the resolution of local lexical-syntactic ambiguities in German. Both speech production data from unprepared oral reading and eye-tracking results from silent reading demonstrate that readers favor syntactic analyses that allow for a prosodic representation in which stressed and unstressed syllables alternate rhythmically. The findings contribute evidence confirming immediate and guiding effects of linguistic rhythm on the earliest stages of syntactic parsing in reading. (Contains 5 figures and 9 tables.)

A controlled reading experiment reveals that stress-based linguistic rhythm impinges on syntactic ambiguity resolution in silent and oral reading. The results suggest that, at points of syntactic underspecification, the accruing prosodic representation may affect even the earliest stages of structure building, viz. the analysis of syntactic features of an ambiguous word. Such an effect remains inexplicable in the context of (psycho-)linguistic theories that assume a strictly unidirectional relationship between syntactic and phonological processes, the latter merely interpreting the conditions the syntactic component imposes on it. Here, a performance compatible grammar in the framework of Optimal Parsing is presented that is capable of capturing the reading data. The model integrates syntactic parsing and prosodification in reading and predicts that, at points of syntactic indetermination, weak prosodic constraints alone may guide syntactic structure assignment. This suggests a bidirectional relationship between syntax and phonology in grammar and processing while, at the same time, confirming a tight coupling of language production and comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]