The Theory of Lexical Phonology


Book Description

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 Theory of Lexical Phonology


Book Description

The theory of Lexical Phonology as Mohanan outlines it has its .roots in the tradition of both SPE phonology and classical phonemics. The central question addressed concerns the nature of the relation between phonological, morphological and syntactic processes. In Lexical Phonology, the focus shifts from the rules themselves to the properties of the (lexical, syntactic, and post-syntactic) modules in which the rules apply. The result is a theory that represents an advancement in the tradition of generative phonology, while capturing what was intuitively true in the tradition of classical phonemics. The theory is based on detailed description of the phonology of English and Malayalam -- Back cover.




The Theory of Lexical Phonology


Book Description

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University of Cologne (Englisches Seminar), 17 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The study of linguistics is a large branch of knowledge that deals with language and communication systems. Since a variety of linguists work on different interests concerning this science, there have been a lot of theories and models to describe specific approaches in human language. Since Chomsky and Halle's Sound Pattern of English (1968), there are a number of further developments according to linguistics. The theory of lexical phonology is one part of the study of linguistics which passes through several conceptions from the 1950s until today. Lexical phonology was developed in the early 1980s by K. P. Mohanan and P. Kiparsky and is the one most similar to classical generative phonology. In the theory of lexical phonology, the lexicon is given a key role and that represents a significant departure from classical models. In the following paper an outlook is given of what is meant by the term lexical phonology, and also a historical background to achieve a general overview. After having arranged the theory into linguistics and historical developments, there is a distinction between lexical and generative phonology. The relation between lexical phonology and morphology with its sharp distinction between lexical and postlexical rules, is presented afterwards. The interaction of phonology and morphology with the levels of representation will be explained to get to mechanisms of phonological changes and the output of phonology. For that reason, the information of the arrangement of affixes will be given. Different word formation processes such as vowel shift rule, vowel reduction, voicing or stress placement are mentioned to show the effect on what was elaborated before. The aim of this paper is to give a general overview of the theory of lexical phonology with its clas




The Theory of Lexical Phonology


Book Description

The theory of Lexical Phonology as Mohanan outlines it has its .roots in the tradition of both SPE phonology and classical phonemics. The central question addressed concerns the nature of the relation between phonological, morphological and syntactic processes. In Lexical Phonology, the focus shifts from the rules themselves to the properties of the (lexical, syntactic, and post-syntactic) modules in which the rules apply. The result is a theory that represents an advancement in the tradition of generative phonology, while capturing what was intuitively true in the tradition of classical phonemics. The theory is based on detailed description of the phonology of English and Malayalam -- Back cover.




Cyclic and lexical phonology


Book Description

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.




Lexical Strata in English


Book Description

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.




The theory of lexical phonology


Book Description

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University of Cologne (Englisches Seminar), language: English, abstract: The study of linguistics is a large branch of knowledge that deals with language and communication systems. Since a variety of linguists work on different interests concerning this science, there have been a lot of theories and models to describe specific approaches in human language. Since Chomsky and Halle’s Sound Pattern of English (1968), there are a number of further developments according to linguistics. The theory of lexical phonology is one part of the study of linguistics which passes through several conceptions from the 1950s until today. Lexical phonology was developed in the early 1980s by K. P. Mohanan and P. Kiparsky and is the one most similar to classical generative phonology. In the theory of lexical phonology, the lexicon is given a key role and that represents a significant departure from classical models. In the following paper an outlook is given of what is meant by the term lexical phonology, and also a historical background to achieve a general overview. After having arranged the theory into linguistics and historical developments, there is a distinction between lexical and generative phonology. The relation between lexical phonology and morphology with its sharp distinction between lexical and postlexical rules, is presented afterwards. The interaction of phonology and morphology with the levels of representation will be explained to get to mechanisms of phonological changes and the output of phonology. For that reason, the information of the arrangement of affixes will be given. Different word formation processes such as vowel shift rule, vowel reduction, voicing or stress placement are mentioned to show the effect on what was elaborated before. The aim of this paper is to give a general overview of the theory of lexical phonology with its classical roots rather than to go into very specific details.




The Lexical Phonology of Slovak


Book Description

This book has both a descriptive and a theoretical purpose. It is the first full phonological description of Slovak, a language spoken by some four-and-a-half million people in Central and Eastern Europe; and it is a study of the theories of lexical, autosegmental, and prosodic phonology, with a particular emphasis on syllable structure. In a synthesis of these two aims, the author demonstrates how the theories can be integrated in a description of a single language. Particular importance is attached to the problem of phonological representations which, it is shown, must be three-dimensional. Both the independence and the interaction of the melodic, skeletal, and syllabic tiers are investigated in detail. The theoretical linguist will find here a detailed and comprehensive description of the language, deepened by an extensive debate on current phonological theory. For the Slavist - of whatever theoretical persuasion - the book offers a discussion of the most recent theoretical developments in phonology, couched in the framework of a familiar type of linguistic material.




Tone in Lexical Phonology


Book Description

This book is a revised version of my Ph.D. dissertation that was submitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983. Although much of the analysis and argumentation of the dissertation has survived rewriting, the organization has been considerably changed. To Paul Kiparsky and Morris Halle, lowe a major debt. Not only has it been a great privilege to work on phonology with both of them, but it is hard to imagine what this piece of research would have looked like without them. (They, of course, may well imagine a number of appropriate ways in which the work could be different had I not been involved .... ) In addition, special thanks are due to Ken Hale, the third member of my thesis committee. Our discussions of a variety of topics (including tone) helped me to keep a broader outlook on language than might have otherwise been the result of concentrating on a thesis topic.




Lexical Phonology and Morphology (RLE Linguistics A: General Linguistics)


Book Description

This book presents a description of the phonology and morphology of the nominal class system in Fula, a dialect which displays 21 nominal classes. These are identified by suffixes, which can attach to nominal, verbal and adjectival stems. The main objective of this work is to show, through a lexical analysis, that there are only two monomorphemic marker variants, and that the distribution of these variants is predictable.