-(a)licious and -(a)thon: new morphemes obey pre-existing constraints

This paper argues that the distribution of -(a)licious and -(a)thon is a result of speakers applying ∗ and ∗ , well-motived constraints in English, to novel suffixes. Both experimental and corpus data show that the form of the suffix, e.g. -alicious with schwa or -licious without, tends to avoid stress clash and hiatus. The claim that speakers use their existing English phonological grammar for these suffixes is supported in three ways. First, the constraints are attested outside of the suffixes, and behave in similar ways across the suffixes and alternations, e.g. ∗ is stronger than ∗ in both -(a)licious suffixation and phonotactics. Second, speakers don’t have sufficient evidence to learn the phonological distribution of the suffixes, but agree on novel words in an experiment. Third, the choice of suffix considers the output of the Rhythm Rule, a phonological rule that resolves stress clash by retracting stress. The clash-avoiding variant of the suffix is more likely in words where stress clash can’t be avoided through the Rhythm Rule. Taken together, these results provide strong support for a view of morphophonology in which suffix selection is conditioned by language-wide phonological constraints, and prove challenging for analyses in which phonological requirements are memorized on a suffix by suffix basis.