From Phonology to Applied Phonetics [antikvár]

CYCLICITY AND PALATALIZATION Péter SIPTÁR Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences The theory of Lexical Phonology proposed in Kiparsky (1982a,b) — and developed in various ways in Mohanan (1982, 1985, 1986), Halle and Mohanan (1985), Kiparsky (1985), Booij and Rubach (1984, 1987), and Rubach (1985) — is a major step forward in generative phonology with respect to the interaction of phonology and morphology. Its basic claim is that morphological rules and word level phonological rules are interspersed (and both types of rules are located within the lexicon). A rule of word phonology (i.e. a lexical phonological rule, which exclusively applies within words) may apply as soon as the required environment for its application has been created by some morphological rule. That is: 'morphology and phonology go hand in hand'. For a very good introduction to Lexical Phonology, discussing its origins and later ramifications, cf. Kaisse and Shaw (1985). The aim of the present paper is to give a brief account of one of the immediate predecessors of Lexical Phonology, and illustrate the way that version, originally proposed by Mascard (1976) and known as Cyclic Phonology, worked. The illustrative material presented here is based on Rubach (1984)'s treatment of palatalization and some related processes in American English. Cyclic phonology is based on the idea that the cyclic application of phonological rules should not be confined to the description of suprasegmental phenomena (as it is in SPE QChomsky and Halle 19683 where cyclic rules are used to assign stress and pitch contours to phonological phrases); rather, some segmental rules should also apply cyclically, in accordance with the principle of Strict Cyclicity. That principle is formally stated by Halle (1978:18) as follows: „A cyclic rule R applies properly on cycle j only if either (a) or (b) is satisfied: (a) R makes specific use of information, part of which is available on a prior pass through the cyclic rules, and part of which becomes first available on cycle j. There are three separate cases subsumed under (a): R refers specifically to some A and B in: (i) [.XAY [._,, B ] Zj; (ii) [ Z Z ) B ] XAY]; (iii) [. X [._, A ] Y [. , B 1 Z1. J J ' J ' (b) R makes specific use of information assigned on cycle j by a rule applying before R." A number of important assumptions follow from the principle of Strict Cyclicity as to the organization of the phonological component of generative grammars. Let us briefly look at some of these assumptions: