Redundancy Rules in Phonology

Abstract

This work contains a discussion of redundancy rules and the role they play in the phonological component of a generative grammar. Phonological redundancy rules were first given a clear theoretical foundation in the MORPHEME STRUCTURE RULES used by Halle (1959) to predict redundant phonological information in morphemes. We will be concerned in what follows with reformulating and extending this original theory of morpheme structure rules. We will give particular attention to the formal nature of morpheme structure rules and to the use of blanks in representing redundancies, and will give a solution to a long-standing problem in this area. In spite of this improvement in morpheme structure rule theory, we will find other motivations for introducing a new formal device, MORPHEME STRUCTURE CONDITIONS, to replace morpheme structure rules. We will attempt to show that, both in the types of statements which can be made about the structure of morphemes and in the formal nature of these statements, morpheme structure conditions are to be preferred over morpheme structure rules.