Contextual Neutralization and the Elsewhere Principle

Abstract

Against the backdrop of this volume, our aim is to contextualize the present chapter within the background of developments in phonological theory and morphological theory of the last fortyodd years, largely those arising from contributions by Morris Halle and his collaborators. The notions of specificity-based competition and blocking, with their indubitable Paninian pedigree, found their way into modern generative linguistics with the introduction of the Elsewhere Principle in Kiparsky 1973, the goal of which was an attempt to reduce extrinsic ordering in Chomsky and Halle 1968. The intuition behind such a principle was that certain rules (or more broadly, operations that modify linguistic representations) will always take precedence over others, given their forms and the relationship of their forms to each other in terms of the fundamental notion of the subset relation from Set Theory. Kiparsky’s contribution to phonological theory allowed researchers—and by hypothesis, language acquirers—to merely inspect the form of certain rules in order to determine their relative ordering.1 ∗Thanks to Boris Harizanov, Vera Gribanova, Peter Svenonius, and other participants at the Stanford Workshop on Locality and Directionality at the Morphosyntax-Phonology Interface, and to the members of GELA-Rio for excellent discussion. Special thanks to the editors, Ora and Alec, for their encouragement and for organizing this endeavor. 1One of Kiparsky’s subsequent breakthroughs, along similar lines, is found in Kiparsky 1982, in which intrinsic ordering is sought between pairs of rules based on their properties such as sensitivity to derived environments, wordboundaries, and so forth, thereby constituting a cluster of properties that, by hypothesis were ordered into relative strata. It is this latter strategy that is pursued in its application to the organization of the morphological component in Arregi and Nevins 2012.