ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a part of English in which the inflectional system interacts with another aspect of grammar, the formation of compound words. Both pluralization and compounding are highly productive processes. It presents data that call into question the traditional characterization of these phenomena and develop an alternative account within the probabilistic constraints framework discussed by Seidenberg and Seidenberg and MacDonald. The chapter intends references to the ‘level-ordering theory’ to include both the original Kiparsky account and the Pinker theory, which incorporates major components of it. English seems to readily accommodate such exceptions: our chapter is about compounds research, not compound research; the experiments were conducted in the Neurosciences Building at USC, not the Neuroscience Building. It develops and assesses an alternative account of the factors that affect the acceptability of different types of modifiers. The chapter investigates major constraints, involving semantic and phonological information that underlies important aspects of the phenomena.
