Studies in Lexical Phonology

This book contains some of the material which originally appeared in my Ph. D. thesis Lexical Phonology, submitted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but it can hardly be called a revised version of the thesis. The theory that I propose here is in many ways radically different from the one that I proposed in the thesis, and there is a great deal of new data and analyses from English and Malayalam. Chapter VI is so new that I haven't even had the time to try it out on my friends. As everyone knows, research is a collective enterprise, even though an individual's name appears on the first page of the book or article. I would think of this book as a joint project involving dozens of people, in which I acted as the project coordinator, collecting suggestions from a wide variety of sources. Four major influences on what the book contains were Morris Halle, Paul Kiparsky, Mark Liberman, and Joan Bresnan. I learned the ropes of doing research on phonology, phonetics, and morphology from them, and almost everything that I discuss in this book owes its shape ultimately to one of them. Among the others who contributed generously to this book are: Jay Keyser, James Harris, Douglas Pulleyblank, Diana Archangeli, Donca Steriade, Elizabeth Selkirk, Francois Dell, Noam Chomsky, Philip Lesourd, Mohammed Guerssel, Michel Kenstovicz, Raj Singh, Will Leben, Joe Perkell, Victor Zue, Paroo Nihalani. P. Madhavan, and Stephanie Shattuck-Hafnagel.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

In Lexical Strata in English, Heinz Giegerich investigates the way in which alternations in the sound patterns of words interact with the morphological processes of the language. Drawing examples from English and German, he uncovers and spells out in detail the principles of 'lexical morphology and phonology', a theory that has in recent years become increasingly influential in linguistics. Giegerich queries many of the assumptions made in that theory, overturning some and putting others on a principled footing. What emerges is a formally coherent and highly constrained theory of the lexicon - the theory of 'base-driven' stratification - which predicts the number of lexical strata from the number of base-category distinctions recognized in the morphology of the language. Finally, he offers accounts of some central phenomena in the phonology of English (including vowel 'reduction', [r]-sandhi and syllabification), which both support and are uniquely facilitated by this new theory.

This volume is a collection of 13 chapters, each devoted to a particular issue that is crucial to our understanding of the way learners acquire, learn, and use an L2 sound system. In addition, it spans both theory and application in L2 phonology. The book is divided into three parts, with each section unified by broad thematic content: Part I, “Theoretical Issues and Frameworks in L2 Phonology,” lays the groundwork for examining L2 phonological acquisition. Part II, “Second Language Speech Perception and Production,” examines these two aspects of L2 speech in more detail. Finally, Part III, “Technology, Training, and Curriculum,” bridges the gap between theory and practice. Each chapter examines theoretical frameworks, major research findings (both classic and recent), methodological issues and choices for conducting research in a particular area of L2 phonology, and major implications of the research findings for more general models of language acquisition and/or pedagogy.

A research perspective that takes language use into account opens up new views of old issues and provides an understanding of issues that linguists have rarely addressed. Referencing new developments in cognitive and functional linguistics, phonetics, and connectionist modeling, this book investigates various ways in which a speaker/hearer's experience with language affects the representation of phonology. Rather than assuming phonological representations in terms of phonemes, Joan Bybee adopts an exemplar model, in which specific tokens of use are stored and categorized phonetically with reference to variables in the context. This model allows an account of phonetically gradual sound change which produces lexical variation, and provides an explanatory account of the fact that many reductive sound changes affect high frequency items first. The well-known effects of type and token frequency on morphologically-conditioned phonological alterations are shown also to apply to larger sequences, such as fixed phrases and constructions, solving some of the problems formulated previously as dealing with the phonology-syntax interface.

The present volume consists of nine articles dealing with the role of the constituent 'phonological word' (or 'prosodic word') in various typologically diverse languages. These languages and their respective families subsume Indo-European (Dutch, German, English, European Portuguese), Bantu (SiSwati, KiNande), Algonquian (Cree), Siouan (Dakota), and Salishan (Lushootseed). One contribution examines the phonological word in a sign language. The theoretical issues dealt with in the book include: evidence for the phonological word (e.g. rules, phonotactics, syllabification, stress patterns), the connection between morphosyntactic and prosodic structure (e.g. alignment phenomena in Optimality Theory), and the relationship between the phonological word and other prosodic constituents (e.g. the prosodic representation of clitics).The volume will be of interest to all linguists and advanced students of linguistics working on Prosodic Phonology, phonology–morphology and phonology–syntax interface and Optimality Theory.