Rules of allomorphy and phonology-syntax interactions

Abstract

i. In a thoughtful discussion of Romance agreement phenomena that appear to run counter to various attractive proposals for universal constraints on linguistic rules, Plank (I984) exposes several cases presenting apparent difficulties for the Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax (PPFS) of Zwicky (I969). The two most telling of these, in French and Spanish, involve what seem to be masculine singular forms occurring where agreement rules of the ordinary sort would call for feminine singulars; in each case, one of the conditioning factors for the peculiar agreement is the phonological shape of the word following the 'agreeing' word (which is a possessive pronoun in French, a definite article in Spanish). I will be maintaining that such examples do not subvert the PPFS. But they are still of considerable interest. One simple lesson to be learned from them is that analytic proposals must be fleshed out in some detail if they are to be evaluated; in particular, we must be clear about what rules of allomorphy in the cases at hand, rules of inflectional allomorphy do and what sorts of conditions they can be subject to, if we are to evaluate an analytic proposal appealing to rules of allomorphy. A more specific lesson is that 'zero morphemes' (if there are any such) are not the same thing as absent morphemes. Another lesson is that morphosyntactic features must be distinguished from formatives; a given bundle of features can have several different formatives as its exponent in different contexts, and a given formative can serve as the exponent of several different feature bundles in different contexts. Finally, examples like Plank's can help us to sharpen our knowledge of the way rules of allomorphy can be conditioned or constrained by phonological, morphological, or syntactic properties of their contexts. In what follows I will assume a process approach to allomorphy rules, building on such works as Matthews (I967, 1972, 1974), Anderson (977), and Janda (I983). In this approach a rule of inflectional allomorphy describes how a bundle of morphosyntactic features on a base is realized phonologically, via some operation or operations on that base. The only such operation we need be concerned with here is affixation, in particular suffixation.