Phonological templates and the lexicon

Abstract

In past phonology literature, diacritics, brackets and other extra-phonological objects have been employed to identify morpheme boundaries and to differentiate words from affixes. In the present study, we argue that all of these extra-phonological items bring arbitrariness to phonological theory since phonology is only concerned with identifying phonological objects. In this respect, the present study proposes a new account in order to identify word boundaries in phonology and to explain phonological processes which show sensitivity to morphological boundaries without referring to any extra-phonological objects. Accordingly, we argue for a novel template model and propose that bases (e.g. words), productive suffixes and prefixes are listed in the lexicon with their own unique phonological templates, ONO, NO and ON, respectively. This means that their morphological categories are recognizable when they come to phonology. Also, the morphological boundness of prefixes and suffixes is visible in our template model: The absence of a final onset in prefixes (ON) and the absence of an initial onset in suffixes (NO) render them phonologically bound to a base because only bases exhibit an (O...O) structure. Accordingly, these morphemes come to phonology with their own templates, and phonological operations (government, licensing, etc.) apply to them when necessary. Also, we put forward two new parameters, the Final Onset Parameter and the Initial Onset Parameter, in order to explain the word-final/word-initial differences among languages. We argue that phonological processes, the phonology-morphology interface and their relation to the lexicon are non-arbitrarily explainable in our model thanks to the templates and novel parameters.

Keywords

• lexicon
• templates
• constituent structure
• phonology-morphology interface