ISCA Archive Interspeech 2024
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2024

Do we EXPECT TO find phonetic traces for syntactic traces?

Jonathan Him Nok Lee, Mark Liberman, Martin Salzmann

In syntactic theories, the existence of silent/inaudible syntactic elements, such as movement traces, has been hypothesized to impact phonetic outcomes. One classic example involves the contraction of “want to” into “wanna,” where intervening syntactic traces are thought to prevent such contraction. This study extends this inquiry to “expect to,” a similar construction but without established morpho-phonological contractions, and investigates whether there are any phonetic effects of the presence of traces. Drawing on findings from wanna- contraction, syntactic theories predict that intervening traces will hinder phonetic reduction in “expect to.” To investigate, we randomly sampled 300 utterances containing “expect to” from a corpus of NPR podcasts. Multivariate linear regression shows no relationship between the presence of intervening syntactic traces and the duration of any phones in “expect to.” However, multinomial logistic regression showed that the lenition of “expect to” (“to” /tu:/ → [tʌ] or [tɪ]) was significantly more likely to occur across intervening syntactic traces. Our findings contradict the predictions posited by syntactic theories, suggesting a more intricate interplay between syntax and phonetics.