Abstract
This chapter discusses a problem in historical linguistics, the problem of rule addition, from the perspective of lexical phonology and morphology (LPM). Rule addition played an important role in the debate of several decades ago on the characterization of language change in the generative framework. Within the LPM model, rule addition can be approached from a somewhat different viewpoint. This model proposes a set of possible rule domains, as well as a constrained mapping between rules and their respective domains. In particular, dialects vary as to what rule domains are selected by accent retraction. Moreover, the cross-dialectal variation follows a clear pattern that receives a straightforward account within the model of LPM. A further property of this model is the lexical/postlexical segregation. The lexical component includes levels smaller than the word, while the postlexical component includes levels larger than the word. The word is thus caught, as it were, at the intersection point between these two components. This is because of the ambiguity of the word domain, which belongs both to the syntax and to the morphology.
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