Lexical Phonology
Description:... This thesis develops the model of Lexical Phonology, in which a subset of phonological rules applies in the lexicon as part of the word formation component. Phonological rules apply after every morphological operation, to the output of which morphological operations may apply once again. The lexicon consists of ordered lexical strata which function as the domains of application Of these phonological and morphological rules. This model eliminates the need for the use of distinct boundary symbols by allowing phonological rules to have direct access to morphological information, and imposes severe restrictions on the class of possible grammars. The model of Lexical Phonology yields three levels of phonological representation, namely, the underlying, the lexical, and the phonetic. The lexical level of representation is the output of the lexical rule applications, which is also the input to lexical insertion. it is shown that several interesting formal and psychological properties converge on this level. Pauses are assigned to lexical representations after lexical insertion, and therefore, lexical rule applications are unaffected by pauses, while post lexical rule applications are blocked by intervening pauses. Speakers' judgments on the 'sameness' and 'distinctness' of speech sounds are based on lexical representations. Secret code languages, such as Pig Latin and the Alb language, take the lexical representation as the input, and so do speech errors which permute phonological segments. It is suggested that the lexical level may also have interesting consequences for theories of speech acquisition, speech recognition, and speech production.
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