Lexical Phonology and the Lexical Syndrome

Abstract

The theory of Lexical Phonology and Morphology (LPM) deals with the place of phonology within the larger grammar. It has much to say about the relation between morphology and phonology, and also provides a model for the integration of phonology with the material provided by syntax and the phrasing derived from syntax. It is also a theory of phonological typology, assigning one set of characteristics to processes that apply only within words (the lexical phonology) and another, complementary set to processes that apply within or between words (the post‐lexical phonology). The theory was first developed in the early 1980s by Kiparsky (1982) and his colleagues and students (especially Mohanan 1982, 1986) at MIT. It rapidly attracted a great deal of interest among phonologists because of the new tools it supplied for attacking recalcitrant problems, the set of intriguing questions it allowed a researcher to ask about any phenomenon, and the organic way it grew out of many of the major trends in phonology and morphology that had occupied linguists since the publication of Chomsky and Halle (1968). LPM was the basis for much of the synchronic and diachronic work, both descriptive and theoretical, that went on in phonology for a decade or more following its birth. Classical LPM was probably also the last model of phonology‐morphology interaction to enjoy a wide consensus (Noyer 2004). LPM remains influential today, in its legacy of ways of thinking about phonology and in new instantiations that marry it with Optimality Theory (Orgun 1996; Kiparsky 2000; Rubach 2000; Bermädez‐Otero, forthcoming; among many others). As is often the case with valuable but complex and inevitably imperfect theories, LPM did not simply collapse under its own weight. Rather, interest largely moved elsewhere. Starting in the early 1990s, many phonologists turned away from rules and derivations to Optimality Theory (OT). Until recently, most versions of OT have involved only one evaluative step – potential output candidates are evaluated simultaneously for their satisfaction of ranked constraints. The result of the large‐scale turn to OT was that most people stopped writing about and within LPM before consensus had been reached on what to do about the difficulties that had been encountered within it. It is certainly true that there was not much from Kiparsky's (1982) proposals that did not have some qualifications, exceptions, or caveats attached by the mid–1990s, but this is not, as we reconstruct it, the main reason one no longer hears so much about LPM. On the contrary, many phonologists continued to recognize advantages to the theory and to adopt pieces of its legacy.