---
title: "Phonetic lapse in American English -<i>ative</i> — Stanton 2019"
description: "The paper looks at variable stress in American English words ending in -ative . 39 references."
authors: ["Juliet Stanton"]
year: 2019
venue: "Glossa: a journal of general linguistics"
source: "https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/5162/"
doi: "10.5334/gjgl.714"
licence: "CC BY 4.0"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/stanton-2019-phonetic-lapse-american-english-i/"
---
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# Phonetic lapse in American English -\<i>ative\</i>

**Authors:** Juliet Stanton · **Year:** 2019 · **Venue:** [Glossa: a journal of general linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/glossa-a-journal-of-general-linguistics/) ([Glossa a journal of general linguistics 2019](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/glossa-a-journal-of-general-linguistics/2019/)) · **Publisher:** [Ubiquity Press](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/ubiquity-press/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.714) · [PDF](https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/5162/galley/12534/download) · [DOI 10.5334/gjgl.714](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.714) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2945185904)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper looks at variable stress in American English words ending in *-ative*. Nanni (1977) observed that *-at-* tends to be stressed after an obstruent or a cluster (*invéstigàtive*) and to stay unstressed after a vowel or sonorant (*cúmulative*). Later stress theory mostly ignored this, because English stress rarely depends on segment detail. Stanton confirms a version of this "Nanni effect" in a large set of *-ative* words transcribed in the OED, and shows it cannot be explained away by factors such as lexical frequency. She then argues that *Lapse, the constraint penalizing runs of unstressed material, should be measured in duration rather than by counting syllables. Longer gaps between stresses get heavier penalties, so stressing *-at-* becomes more attractive when the preceding consonants are long. Two experiments, in which speakers chose stress placements for nonce *-ative* words, support this account over purely segment-identity explanations (e.g. Davis 1988). Weaker parallel trends in *-ization* words suggest the effect is general. The result implies that rhythmic constraints in phonology can see fine-grained timing.

## Key points
- The paper contrasts two definitions of *Lapse:
  - **syllabic:** one violation per pair of unstressed syllables, following Gordon 2002;
  - **phonetic:** one violation per millisecond of unstressed material between two stressed vowels. This version is later revised so that only spans above a minimum duration are penalized.
- The analysis also uses Stress-*ive*, a suffix-specific preference for stressing *-ive*, and a syllabic *Clash that forbids adjacent stresses. Together these allow *-àtive* or *-atìve*, but not both.
- The data come from OED transcriptions plus two nonce-word preference experiments, approved under NYU IRB-FY-2017-707. Statistical model results are in an online appendix.
- In *-ization* words, the consonants after the first stress matter: *-ize-* stress rates are 86% (vowel), 92% (sonorant), 96% (obstruent) and 98% (cluster), with p \< .05 (Fisher's Exact Test).
- Two other *-ization* comparisons show no clear effect:
  - Segments directly before *-ize-* show no effect (p > .1).
  - Clash across longer consonant strings trends the predicted way but is not significant (p = .08).

## Interesting ideas
- Pit a count-based and a measurement-based version of the same constraint against each other, using cases where the two make different predictions (*àbracadábra* vs *àbraskladábra*).
- Use invented words to test whether a pattern is a productive generalization rather than memorized lexical behavior.
- Before claiming an effect, rule out confounds like lexical frequency that could produce the same surface pattern.
- Make a gradient penalty apply only past a minimum threshold, instead of penalizing every unit linearly.
- Check that a pattern found with one suffix (*-ative*) recurs with another (*-ization*) before treating it as general grammar.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (learn): build evaluation pairs where competing scoring hypotheses diverge, so a test can actually tell which rule the system has learned.
- **I2** (tokens): probe the lemmatizer and tagger with nonce derivatives such as made-up *-ative*/*-ization* forms, checking that suffix analysis generalizes beyond dictionary entries.
- **I3** (learn): add frequency-matched negative controls when judging whether a self-induced repair rule really captures structure.
- **I4** (tree): length-based penalties on dependency arcs in the perceptron parser could be thresholded the same way, so short arcs stay free and only unusually long ones are discouraged.
- **I5** (tokens): when a morphology heuristic is discovered on one affix, require it to replicate on a sibling affix before promoting it to a general rule in crate en.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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- [New York University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/new-york-university/) — University, New York, United States · 201 works · 100,180 citations

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🧭 Topics (1): [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · 2,263 works

## Cite

Cite as: Juliet Stanton. 2019. Phonetic lapse in American English -\<i>ative\</i>. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{stanton2019phonetic,
  title = {{Phonetic lapse in American English -<i>ative</i>}},
  author = {Juliet Stanton},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.714},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.714}
}
```

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## References

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37. How to cite this article: Stanton, Juliet. 2019. Phonetic lapse in American English -ative. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4(1): 55. 1–37. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.714 [↗](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.714)
38. Accepted: 13 February 2019 [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Accepted%3A+13+February+2019)
39. Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS [↗](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

*Updated 1 November 2026*