10 - The Role of Syntax and the Lexicon in Phonology

Abstract

This chapter discusses two factors that control the application of a phonological rule: the phonetic properties comprising the feature matrixes of segments and the derivational source of a segment. There are other essentially nonphonetic factors that may govern the application of a rule and play a significant role in forming the phonological structure of a language. The nonphonetic factors influencing the application of a phonological rule fall into two broad categories. First, there are extra-grammatical factors because they fall outside of “grammar” as this term has been normally understood in generative as well as in most other theories of linguistics. Although most linguists have acknowledged the importance of these factors, they have been studied least of all. The second nonphonetic factor influencing the application of phonological rules is grammatical information, which is divided into two broad categories—syntactic/morphological versus lexical. The former represents information that is independently needed in the grammar to describe the syntactic or morphological structure of morphemes and words, while the latter represents information that, while not independently motivated, is required to provide a full description of the phonological behavior of a morpheme.