Lexical Phonology and Morphology: an overview

Current models of Lexical Phonology vary markedly in their approaches to certain central areas of debate. In this chapter, I shall identify these controversial areas and outline the assumptions I shall make in the model of LP developed in the rest of the book. Some of these are shared with other current versions of LP; others are new. Before proceeding to these reassessments, however, I shall provide a historical outline of LP, highlighting its inheritance in terms of both phonology and morphology, which will provide a shared background for the discussion below.

Morphology

As Aronoff (1976: 4) observes, ‘Within the generative framework, morphology was for a long time quite successfully ignored. There was a good ideological reason for this: in its zeal, post-Syntactic Structures linguistics saw syntax and phonology everywhere, with the result that morphology was lost somewhere in between’. The inclusion of the traditional substance of morphology within syntax meant that, in the Aspects (Chomsky 1965) model, no distinction was drawn between word-building and sentence-building operations: all distributional regularities were necessarily captured using transformational rules, which derived related surface structures from a common Deep Structure. This methodology, and the large number of surface relations between words and constructions to be accounted for, had two results: the Deep Structures became progressively more remote from these surface representations, and the transformations became more and more complex and unconstrained.