Phonology

Abstract

This chapter gives a brief overview of current approaches within the generative tradition to modelling the morphology–phonology interface, with particular attention to the interaction of phonology with inflectional morphology. Critical questions include whether morphological and phonological derivations are interleaved, as in cyclic or stratal models, whether the phonological grammar can reference relations among output forms within the same paradigm, and whether the notion of inflectional paradigm has any status as such in phonological theory. A key issue is the extent to which patterns of morphological exponence can be sensitive to the phonological well-formedness of the eventual output form, as when allomorph selection is viewed as (phonological) output optimization. Empirical topics surveyed include construction-specific phonology, cyclicity effects, paradigm levelling, paradigm anti-homophony effects, phonologically motivated paradigm gaps, and phonologically conditioned suppletive allomorphy.