The Prosody and Quantity of English Compounds

Following the earlier works of Booij
(1985) and Nespor & Vogel (1986) I provide
further evidence that English compounds are made
up of prosodic words. The length of the first
components must be preserved because they are
identical to basic lexical forms. In some other
languages, as for example in Serbian, the length of
the first components may be shortened because the
inclusion of linking vowels can contribute to the
building of the required ‘derived environment’
(Kiparsky 1985). This invoking of the strict cyclicity
condition is however necessary only for those
English dialects in which the accented syllables are
not necessarily closed. In this paper I discuss the
prosodic status and quantity of English compounds.